GIVING BACK

HOW ONE LOCAL PHILANTHROPIST IS CRACKING THE CHARITY CODE

In 2007, while Monica Maldonado Williams worked for the Austin Bar Association, lawyers often expressed an interest in doing community service. Williams spent a lot of time reaching out to nonprofits to see how the lawyers could get involved.

“It was frustrating,” says the writer and editor who became the publisher of Giving City, a respected, mostly online magazine about local philanthropy. “I’ve since learned why and how nonprofits work — and why they don’t always have the capacity to ser ve volunteers.”

No surprise: Most nonprofits are set up almost exclusively to take care of their clients.

“Serving the volunteers is gravy,” Williams, 44, says. “Some groups treat it as important. Some as their main thing. Most nonprofits don’t have the staff to do volunteer management and their main missions, too.”

Since today’s volunteers are often tomorrow’s donors — a recent study by Greenlights , a group focused on solving complex community problems, showed that less than 15 percent of the region’s nearly 6,000 nonprofits have any paid staff — the nonprofit sector will contin

ue to be hobbled in the future unless things change.

In the past eight years, Williams has looked hard at the nonprofit sector.

Most recently, with Mando Rayo, CEO at Mando Rayo + Collective, a multicultural di gital marketing agency, Williams has created the New Philanthropists, an initiative to match underutilized leaders with nonprofit boards of directors.

They discovered that promising younger Austinites, newcomers, retirees and specifically people of color — often profiled in Giving City — aren’t at the board of directors table.

“She tells the full story of Austin,” Rayo says of Williams. “From big charity events to families struggling to get by, as well as inspiring stories from young leaders of color to established leaders of Austin. ... Because of her work, she has been able to engage thousands of people to be part of our community and truly make an impact with nonprofits here.”

Magazines to nonprofifits

Born and raised in San Antonio, Williams is the daughter of Rene Maldonado, a retired civil servant, and Margarita Alvarez del Castillo Maldonado, a retired Social Security Administration worker. Her mother’s mother helped raise four kids.

“She was the stay-at-home mom,” Williams says. “I had