Today we’d like to introduce you to Marie Appel
Hi Marie, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I grew up in a rural farming town in Upstate New York and attended public school. I was the first in my immediate family to attend college and went to Harvard University. When I saw how behind I and some of my classmates were relative to our private & boarding school peers, my passion for fixing educational inequity was ignited. Immediately after graduation, I became a 3rd & 4th grade teacher with Teach for America in Jackson, Mississippi.
From there, I came to Dallas to work with Dallas ISD administration and ideally improve some of the conditions I saw for students and teachers in the classroom. I continued that journey with The Commit Partnership, deepening my skills and love for data & policy to achieve that goal.
I went further into the policy and politics realm, both as the executive director of a non-partisan political action committee focused on electing student-centric school board trustees and as a political consultant.
After the soul searching that many of us did during the pandemic, I realized that rather than asking community members to vote, I much preferred to directly serve those living in under-resourced neighborhoods. That’s how Groundwork DFW was born. We actually repurposed the political campaign infrastructure to be a community engagement mechanism to deliver social services to those families. For example, our current Community Campaign is with the City of Dallas & WIC to bring supplemental nutritional resources to families with children under 5.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
lol.
No.
The road hasn’t been smooth, but I also don’t know if I would say bumpy either. More so twisting and winding. I am a planner, but I couldn’t possibly see around these corners to what was coming next. I never could have predicted that I would be here, but I also think it is exactly where I need to be. If you know me, Groundwork has been a surprise that also makes 1000% sense.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
What should we know? What do you do, what do you specialize in / what are you known for?
Groundwork DFW is Dallas-based nonprofit whose vision is to increase access to opportunity through data-driven community engagement. Ok well what does that mean? I am so glad you asked!
Groundwork knocks doors. We are boots on the ground. At any given time, we have a staff of 12-45 folks out knocking on doors, attending community meetings, and speaking face-to-face with neighbors to spread awareness about social surfaces or survey the community.
What sets you apart from others?
No one does exactly what Groundwork DFW does. The closest comparisons on either side would be traditional marketing companies, and maybe a local advocacy group on the other side. We exist in the white space i between.
Besides being non-profit, our Community Campaigns are a form of “guerilla marketing” that rely on the harmony between data and real people. Our data guides us to the most target-rich environments where our staff will be successful, but then relationships and face-to-face conversation take the reigns from there.
Another unique feature is what that means for staff: Our organization has what’s called a “double bottom line.” We help the families we serve get access to resources…but we do that by hiring from the communities we serve. All (100%) of our staff come from the communities we work in and are paid $20/hr or more, creating transitional or part time workforce opportunities for those who might not otherwise have it. Our staff is also 85% people of color, 77% female, and 69% bilingual,
What do you want our readers to know about your brand, offerings, services, etc.?
Groundwork’s mission is to enable organizations to extend their reach of essential resources in underserved communities. That means that we are predominantly an fee-for-service non-profit, so a majority (99.4%) of our funding comes from organizations hiring us to do community outreach in an area where there are folks who may be unaware they qualify for that social service.
An example of this is PreK campaign with The Commit Partnership, Dallas ISD, Mesquite ISD, and Garland ISD. Commit has hired us to target areas of those school districts with low PreK enrollment relative to the number of eligible children in the area. We are in Year 3 of this campaign and as the recent headlines about enrollment increases (https://www.dmagazine.com/micropost/good-enrollment-news-for-dallas-isd/) and the double-digit data gains suggest, this campaign has been wildly successful.
We have a full services menu available at https://bit.ly/GroundworkServices.
Our clients are typically school districts, cities, universities, or other non-profits who want to do community engagement but don’t have the staff to be all over at once, or manage all of those people, payroll, etc.
Groundwork is meant to achieve economies of scale for the DFW area by being everyone’s community engagement team.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
Growing up, I was a little adult. I come from a working class town where money was tight and everyone got a job by age 14, and I was no exception.
Even though my parents hadn’t gone to college, I knew that I needed to, if only to get out of my little town with more cows in it than people. I played a lot of sports & was way over-committed as a kid, which (mostly) kept me out of trouble.
That said, I was a kid with BIG feelings. I would get really upset when I saw things that were unfair in the world (I literally used to cry every single time I saw a person who was unhoused until I was like 10). It made me a really sensitive & dramatic kid, but it has turned me into a really driven adult who won’t take no for an answer when it comes to fixing the issues that used to make me cry.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.groundworkdfw.org
- Instagram: @groundworkdfw
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GroundworkDFW/
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/groundwork-dfw/
