Galveston (October 30, 2026)—Inside the commercial-scale kitchen at a former elementary school in Galveston, Tex., Erica Delgadillo points with excitement to huge ovens, stainless steel countertops, and rolling racks of sheet pans. Here she plans to train aspiring entrepreneurs on the skills they’ll need to work in the food industry.

Last September, a local nonprofit purchased the former school for $2.8 million. The project is part of a broader effort to transform the city, bringing together local funders, nonprofits, and government officials around a community-developed plan for change. 

The nonprofit leading the effort, Vision Galveston, plans to build at least 20 two- and three-bedroom homes for teachers, firefighters, and other civic employees on the site. The school grounds will also host a public park. The school’s cafeteria will become a “resilience hub,” where residents can go in an emergency. And kids can play in the gym’s air-conditioning in the summer. A nearby community garden will provide produce for Delgadillo’s kitchen.

This project is just one tangible result of Vision Galveston’s work. After spending 10 months gathering input from more than 8,500 residents in 2019, the organization developed a 78-point plan addressing many of the island’s complex issues. The island’s massive cruise ship port, beaches, and Victorian downtown cater to tourists and vacation homeowners, while full-time residents often struggle to remain on the island, which is the birthplace of Juneteenth. Big national issues like affordable housing, education, economic opportunity, and disaster preparedness feature in the plan, as do local concerns like the number of buses that go to the beach.

Rather than letting big donors call the shots, Vision Galveston gave residents the central role in shaping its priorities. 

Vision Galveston’s CEO, Christine Bryant, knows the plan’s 78 points by heart. Because thousands of residents shaped the plan, it’s easy to decide what the group should tackle or not. “These are not my ideas,” she says. “This is what Galveston said they wanted.” 

Vision Galveston’s doesn’t try to invent everything from scratch. It takes local funders, nonprofit leaders, and government officials on trips to learn from what’s worked in other cities. That determination to learn from others was part of Vision Galveston’s origin story. It was founded after Katherine Lorenz, president of the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, persuaded a group of local leaders to visit Detroit to learn from the Kresge Foundation about how it helped when the city went through bankruptcy in 2013. The Mitchell Foundation has since provided $5.3 million in funding to Galveston-related efforts. 

Vision Galveston has also taken advantage of a unique asset. Thanks in part to a rich history as a shipping and banking hub in the 19th century, Galveston, with a population of just 50,000, boasts 27 grant makers that have more than $1 million in assets so it has many funders to turn to. Vision Galveston has also leveraged the island’s small community to develop local talent and networks. Delgadillo, for example, didn’t get that kitchen space by chance. She leads MarMo Innovations, a nonprofit that runs a multiuse building that acts as a kind of nonprofit hub. Vision Galveston is a key tenant. In 2024, Delgadillo won the funding for the nonprofit food service project by presenting her idea at a Shark Tank-style philanthropy pitch contest called PhilanthroVision Galveston, which Vision Galveston puts on. It’s that network that helped her find the space in the school project, and that project will benefit from her vision.

The island’s small feel gives everyone a sense of connection, says Lauren Scott, executive director of the Harris & Eliza Kempner Fund, a Galveston-based family foundation that gave Vision Galveston nearly $600,000 from 2020 to 2024. “You’re bumping into one another, or you’re at a restaurant,” she says. “All that relationship is right at your fingertips, which makes this kind of work really exciting.”

Housing, parks, and air-conditioners

After seven years, Vision Galveston is starting to notch some accomplishments. In June, the city received a $2 million Environmental Protection Agency grant to clean up polluted soil in a neglected park. Vision Galveston helped make it possible, paying for a consultant to help the city apply for the grant and securing a separate $30,000 grant to assess the site for cleanup.

It has raised another $1.2 million for a separate park project that will use landscaped channels called bioswales to mitigate flooding — a major issue on an island that is only about 6 feet above sea level.

Vision Galveston doesn’t need to be the face of every effort, Bryant says. “We should be almost invisible,” she says. “We’re kind of like infrastructure. Like a street.”

But having one group, like Vision Galveston, coordinate the work, track progress, and keep the funders and nonprofits focused is a key ingredient to making place-based efforts successful, says Lauren Hult, a partner at Bridgespan, a consulting firm that advises charities.

Alongside larger projects, Vision Galveston has pursued smaller improvements that residents can see and feel in their daily lives. Through a partnership with the local utility, it has installed more than 50 free combination air conditioner and heater units to residents who need them and has weatherized 167 homes. Another project provides free home repairs to low-income residents. The goal, says Bryant, is to help long-term residents stay in their homes.

Another visible public improvement: pop-up parks on vacant lots in underserved neighborhoods. It has installed one at the oldest Black-owned taxi stands in Texas for $10,000. 

Pairing a long-term vision with concrete accomplishments is important to keeping community members engaged, says Bridgespan’s Hult. “People are seeing some impact in the near term as you’re building to some of these longer-term issues,” she says. “It takes time to build things and see those in the environment. And it’s a really important signal to the community that this is responding to your very real needs in the near term.”

Grant makers come together

All of these accomplishments were hard to imagine a decade ago. 

In 2011, Lorenz took over the Mitchell foundation, which grew out of a fortune her grandfather made from developing fracking techniques to remove natural gas from shale. Lorenz also leads the Giving Pledge’s Next Gen group of donors. At the time, Lorenz says, philanthropic leaders collaborated primarily on hurricane and flood response. Beyond that context, Lorenz says, they lacked a broader shared vision. “They were meeting and they were talking, but they weren’t aligning,” she says.

Along with family members, she began developing a new strategy for local giving. In 2017, she organized the trip to Detroit. They met with Rip Rapson, Kresge’s CEO, who stressed the importance of beginning with public input and turning to experts for guidance. Leaders in Galveston, like those in Detroit, would need the cooperation of local government, businesses, and nonprofits. He encouraged them to visit other cities together to learn about targeted successes. Funders, he says, can play a unique role. “The foundation community in Galveston is so interesting,” he says. “It is long-term, patient capital.”

“They’re there to hold the common good of the community,” he says. “If you start working through the community engagement process and make sure that you’re grabbing the expertise of City Hall and grab the expertise of the housing sector or the commercial sector or the banking sector, then slowly as these investable propositions begin to emerge, you’ve gotten buy-in from all of the sectors.”

The Galveston group left Detroit feeling fired up. “I was just electrified by it,” says Scott of the Harris & Eliza Kempner Fund. “I’m a social worker by training, so I’m like, this is how the work should be done. People know what they need. All you have to do is ask them and just listen closely.”

Meanwhile, generational leadership changes were happening at several Galveston-based family foundations, says Pepper Ammann, chair of the board at the Ippolito Charitable Foundation. “The old guard of funders was old, white, and male,” she says. “All their children and other people started coming up.”

Soon, a small group of Galveston grant makers led by Betty Massey, executive director of the Mary Moody Northen Endowment, began funding an effort to gather residents’ ideas through surveys and group meetings at schools, homes, and nonprofit offices. Eleven funders contributed nearly $1.3 million to support the beginnings of Vision Galveston. Over 10 months of outreach and more than 90 events, more than 8,500 residents weighed in. 

This level of listening isn’t easy, says Hult. “It takes time, it takes effort,” she says. “Philanthropy is not always excited about funding that coordination.” But it paid off.

Learning Journeys create momentum

Trips like the one to Detroit have been central to Vision Galveston’s success, according to an independent report commissioned by the Mitchell Foundation to assess the program’s progress after five years.

Funders, nonprofit leaders, and government officials from Galveston have traveled to New Orleans to learn about coastal resilience, to Pittsburgh for insights on economic development, and to cities including St. Petersburg, Fla., to learn about housing — eight trips in total. The review found that the trips, which cost less than $45,000 each, helped build relationships, created alignment on strategy, improved collaboration, and inspired new approaches to big problems like housing and education.

“The learning journey is a marvelous tool to help us see what’s out there,” says former Mayor Craig Brown, who left office in May. “It gives us kind of a road map on how to proceed.”

Housing is a priority in Galveston, where only about 63 percent of homes are primary residences, according to a city analysis. With so much housing used as second homes and short-term rentals, rising prices are making it harder for longtime residents, teachers, firefighters, and others to remain on the island.

On the St. Petersburg trip, two Galveston City Council members learned about changes there that have helped boost the number of housing units and bring down costs. For example, St. Petersburg removed requirements for a second stairwell — common in building codes — for some kinds of housing. It’s an idea that might work in Galveston, says Cody Wright, president of the Galveston Housing Finance Corporation and finance director of a local nonprofit, Groundswell.

Camaraderie is built into each trip’s structure, says Wright. “We’re always together with everyone — whether we’re on the bus or panels, not a spare minute is left without doing something,” she says. “That just makes it all the more worth it to step away from your daily life to go do these events.”

Developing talent

Shared goals and funding can only go so far without talented local leaders who bring new perspectives to carry out the work, says Bryant. Galveston’s annual PhilanthroVision contest, where residents pitch their ideas to a panel of experts in front of an audience of hundreds who vote on winners, helps to develop the next generation of leaders.

With help from coaches, contestants develop pitches for projects and organizations that they hope to get funded. The idea was championed by the Ippolito Foundation and is funded by it, the Mitchell Foundation, and Amoco Federal Credit Union. Since it launched in 2022, it has awarded $432,000 to local nonprofits and individuals. 

Courtesy of Vision Galveston

The funding and the experience can be transformative, says Casey McAuliffe, executive director of Groundswell, which runs a farmers market and school garden programs. She was the first winner of PhilanthroVision and is now a Vision Galveston board member. 

Groundswell won $60,000 that first year, allowing McAuliffe to hire a new employee to further develop the young gardeners program. 

Honi Alexander, who directs Groundswell’s young gardeners program, is another contest winner. She won the Mortar contest — a version of PhilanthroVision but for small businesses — with an idea that grew out of her experience in gardens. Unable to find garden gnomes that reflected the diversity of the kids she works with, Alexander started a business making her own. Other winners include hot sauce makers, bakers, and even a self-help author. 

“The biggest thing that PhilanthroVision and Mortar does is check your confidence and check your toughness,” Alexander says. “That helps people to develop internal confidence and internal fortitude.”

These events also deepen already close connections among nonprofits, funders, and businesses in Galveston. McAuliffe knew all of the contestants in the 2026 PhilanthroVision. She also hired one of the people Alexander mentored for last year’s Mortar contest as the group’s market manager. She’d known him since he was a teenager.  

“Seeing him get up on stage and present himself and be very composed, I really didn’t care about his business venture, to be honest with you. But I was very impressed,” she says. “I need someone who can stand up in front of people, hold their own.”

In 2024, with funding from the Mitchell Foundation, Vision Galveston partnered with the American Leadership Forum to create a nine-month training program for local nonprofit executives. Three of the program’s first 14 graduates now lead local nonprofits. Efforts like this help ensure that a new generation of local leaders will have a voice in the Island’s future, says Bryant. That is particularly important as young people have moved away — and as the Black population shrinks.

“Representation matters here on this island,” says Bryant. “Our overall population is increasing, but we’re losing our families. We’re losing youth. Developing talent pipelines is very important.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy.