A Share Tank Holiday

This week I had the privilege to help award thousands of dollars of charitable grants to more than a dozen nonprofits in Irving, TX as part of a program they have called “Share Tank”. It’s patterned after the TV show “Shark Tank” and is operated by the Greater Irving/Las Colinas Chamber of Commerce. It is a program I wish every community would consider duplicating.

With support from city officials and the business community, the Chamber obtains funding pledges from businesses and individuals to provide a pot of money available to the nonprofits. Local nonprofits sign-up for the program and agree to attend four half-day education/training sessions that help them prepare for appearing before a panel of funders to make their pitch for the money. Along the way they get valuable training in areas important to nonprofits, especially the smaller ones who don’t have paid staff. All the training is free to the nonprofits, plus it provides excellent networking opportunities for the charities that are often unaware of each other.

I worked in Irving for the better part of 30 years and for most of that time I was the person in charge of all of my company’s charitable giving in Texas and many other states. (This is why I was invited to be on the Share Tank Steering Committee due to my extensive experience in charitable giving.) But I was only aware of a handful of the charities I’ve met in the Share Tank program. I’ve been made aware of so many great nonprofits that I knew nothing about previously, because most of them are just too small to get on the radar screen of a large corporation like the one for which I worked. So Share Tank is a unique opportunity for businesses to collaborate with and support vital nonprofit work at the local level.

Any community would benefit from implementing a program like this. Kudos to Irving leaders for developing such a program, and especially to the Chamber for providing the staff resources to oversee it. It really put me in the Christmas spirit to be able to announce the winners of the grants and see the happy faces of the nonprofit staff and volunteers come forward to pose for pictures with the “big checks”. Talk to your city leaders or Chamber leaders about duplicating this program in your community – I know the Irving Chamber would be happy to share information about how to do it.