Member Voices: Rebecca Powers and the Kitchen Table Six

In celebration of our 20th anniversary year, Impact Austin is sharing a variety of stories from and about our members. Each story is unique to the voice (or voices) we profile, but each also speaks to one aspect of our extraordinary collective.

Our first story comes from Rebecca Powers. Her voice takes us back to Impact Austin's very beginning. A 2014 blog post shares some of this content, and Rebecca's book Trust Your Cape adds detail.

Early years

The seed for our women’s philanthropy group was planted on January 21, 2003, when Rebecca Powers read an article in PEOPLE Magazine about a group of women in Cincinnati, Ohio, who pooled their individual $1000 donations and gave $123,000 to a dental clinic for the homeless. That article sparked the idea that developed into a successful movement, later named Impact Austin.

The founding board had the perfect mix of women with the necessary business acumen to launch a start-up nonprofit. Rebecca wrote, "As founding board members, the six of us had two things in common: various business backgrounds and no understanding of the nonprofit landscape in Austin." But they were well-connected!

(L to R: Nancy Word, Cindy Moreland, Jane Nolden , Rebecca Powers, Phylis Donelson, Glenda Holmstrom)

That founding board became known as The Kitchen Table Six. "Each time we met it was around someone's kitchen table. There was something very grounding about that, and it bonded us." Rebecca knew Glenda Holmstrom through a neighborhood Bible study. Glenda was the contemplative facts-figures-research brain to Rebecca's gregarious sales instinct. They knew Phylis Donelson through the neighborhood Bible study also; Rebecca credits Phylis as "sanity-checker," helping Rebecca mature as the group's leader. Phylis was also a terrific recruiter. Cindy Moreland was Rebecca's friend from the high school baseball stands; she joined in time for the first four-person board meeting. Cindy's husband had started a nonprofit and gave a contribution to help defray start-up costs. Nancy Word was introduced by Glenda; she "soon became our one-person marketing department." A photo by Nancy's son inspired Impact Austin's first logo. Jane Nolden joined after hearing about the concept from Phylis while they walked the Capital 10K. Jane added some much-needed technology expertise to the board. Rebecca explained, “We exploited our talents, and what we didn’t know, we researched. We asked experts in the community and got really sound advice." Rebecca named Barry Silverberg and Fayrouz Benyousef among the helpful community experts.

The board built the Impact Austin model by incorporating the ‘six C’s’ of women’s giving, coined by Sondra Shaw-Hardy and Martha Taylor and now common to other women's giving circles. Create. Change. Connect. Commit. Collaborate. Celebrate. Rebecca describes our organization’s first five years as “focused on explosive growth in membership, coupled with structured grant application and review processes that garnered the respect of funders and nonprofits alike. By encouraging our members to participate on committees to review grant applications, and thereby learn more about needs in the community, we developed a reputation for being an ‘army of informed philanthropists’ who had changed the face of giving in Austin.”

The next steps

Striving to be more than grantmakers, Impact Austin members pursued that quest to become “informed philanthropists.” The first Discovery Day launched in 2007. Sixteen years later it’s still an Impact Austin signature event. Town Hall Meeting, another signature event, typically includes inspirational speakers and informative topics. In 2014, Impact-EDU was launched to provide philanthropy education programming to members. Today philanthropy education events are recorded on our blogs, Past Events page, and YouTube channel.

Since our inception, Rebecca Powers and Impact Austin have fostered ties with other collective giving groups – to our benefit and theirs. Rebecca has played formative roles in the development of other giving circles, and this will be the topic of a future blog.

In 2011, Rebecca stepped away from day-to-day leadership of Impact Austin and passed the torch to the first paid executive director, Liz Fitzgerald. Donna Benson-Chan served next, and Christina Gorczynski was hired in 2018, serving nearly four years as Executive Director. At the time this blog was written, Impact Austin had employed an executive search firm to find its next dynamic and inspiring leader to take our giving circle beyond new thresholds.

Impact Austin continues to evolve both responsively and proactively to community needs, organizational growth, and members’ aspirations. In 2018, a new Mission, Vision and Strategic Plan announced a bold future for Impact Austin. Values were added, and priority objectives, and now a strategic plan extension carries out our work through FY2024. A Strategic Advisory Council was added to our leadership in FY2021.

Since Impact Austin's first grant was awarded in 2004 to LifeWorks, we've met and surpassed some exciting grant thresholds.

2007 $1 million

2009 $2 million

2011 $3 million

2013 $4 million