Nonprofits and NGOs

Outdoor Competition Grills Up Support For Disabled Veterans

Here's pulling for great weather next Friday. Students from the culinary program at the Art Institute of Dallas are planning an outdoor event to raise money for Patriot PAWS. The nonprofit organization provides service dogs free of charge to disabled veterans. The event will pit two teams from the c ... More >>

Help West this Sunday: Buy Kolaches and Hear Some Acoustic Solo Toadies (And Many More)

This Sunday local restaurants and musicians will team up to raise money to help West recover from last week's deadly fatal fertilizer plant explosion. Jonathan Tyler and the Northern Lights, The O's, Somebody's Darling and Goodnight will perform, and Toadies front man Vaden Todd Lewis will play a b ... More >>

McKinney Sen. Ken Paxton's Tax-Credit Voucher Bill a Sneaky Way to Route Public Money to Private Religious Schools

The idea behind McKinney Senator Ken Paxton's proposed legislation really is pretty ingenious. The whole school-choice voucher idea -- essentially a guise to funnel public money to religious schools -- invariably runs afoul of constitutional challenges. So, lately, that movement has shifted its stra ... More >>

Greg Abbott Invents War on Christmas, Declares Victory

Despite its vaguely official-sounding name, the Christmas Bureau of Austin & Travis County is not a branch of local government. It's a nonprofit charity, one that purports to help needy individuals and families during the holiday season. That seems to be what the organization did from 1964, when it ... More >>

Get Your Chipotle Fix For $2 On Halloween. With One Catch...

Tomorrow is Halloween, just so you know. It's also Wednesday, which means if you're at least 23, you're probably working all day instead of getting daydrunk and flinging fake blood on one of your old undershirts to make a "costume." But maybe you should swing by Party City on your lunch break and ... More >>

Apocalypse Now(ish): Irvin Baxter's End Times Empire

Death, destruction and the end of humanity: Dallas pastor Irvin Baxter is building a media juggernaut by predicting the very worst.

Miller Lite Wants You to Know it Pays For Hispanic Kids to Go to College. It Doesn't Tell You it Doesn't Do it Very Well

Miller Lite announced yesterday that, for the second year in a row, it will partner with the Dallas Cowboys and a nonprofit called Adelante U.S. Educational Leadership Fund "to support educational programming and resources for Hispanics through the 'Scoring for Education' campaign." In layman's ter ... More >>

A Week After Anouncing He's Leaving Parigi, Chad Houser's Already Talking Like A Suit

Chad Houser isn't talking like a chef lately. The long time toque at Parigi uses terms like board members and ROI, and discusses the legal matters of incorporation and trademarking. His new lexicon is borne out of his new position with Cafe Momentum, and he sounds a lot more like a CEO than someone ... More >>

Meet David Preziosi, Preservation Dallas' New Executive Director

Katherine Seale officially ended her five-year tenure as executive director of Preservation Dallas early this year, but she didn't stop working. Instead, she's been hanging around as a volunteer until the nonprofit found a new leader. That just happened. The nonprofit announced in a press release t ... More >>

Mike Miles Taps Teach for America's DFW Director as DISD's New Chief Talent Officer

Teach for America, the elite student-teacher pipeline founded by Highland Parker Wendy Kopp, is often tossed into the bucket with the rest of the tools in the reform movement's toolbox, from charter schools to performance-based pay and the like. For that, and for its place outside the labor movement ... More >>

Booze Hounds

Rustle Up Some Used Stuff

State of Texas Announces Live Music Grant Program for Free Concerts

by Craig Hlavaty The Texas Music Office, a division of the Office of the Governor, announced Friday the creation of the Live Music Grant Program, funding free concerts across the state. But don't get all excited yet. This is the Texas guv'ment we are dealing with, after all, so there are a few catc ... More >>

Dallas City Hall Wants to Create Nonprofit to Help Uplift Education Sell Bonds for Expansion

​Speaking of Uplift Education and its planned expansion into Deep Ellum ...There's an intriguing item that just appeared on the Dallas City Council's consent addendum for next week's meeting, posted here. According to the doc, the city wants to create a nonprofit called the City of Dallas Educatio ... More >>

Cafe Momentum, a Restaurant by At-Risk Kids, Keeps Popping Up and May Soon Settle Down

Chad Houser and Janice Provost are gearing up again. The faces behind the non-profit organization Cafe Momentum are preparing to announce their next pop-up dinner, to be held in February at Bolsa Mercado. The event will feature chefs Jeff Harris and Matt Balke. Last year, Houser and Provost used si ... More >>

Since You Gotta Spend Money to Make It, City Looks Outside For Help Growing Small Biz

​Far as Dallas City Hall's concerned, it's hard out there for a small start-up, which is why it's spent years loaning and granting money to businesses via, say, the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund and the Southern Dallas Development Corporation, both of which have suffered their share of sputter ... More >>

Friend of Unfair Park Bill Holston to Take the Reins at the Human Rights Initiative

​There's no need to introduce Bill Holston -- attorney, KERA contributor, nature-trekker -- to longtime Friends of Unfair Park; he's one of the good ones, and has been for a long, long while. But Bill's about to disappear from these virtual pages, at least for a little while; he writes, "I promis ... More >>

The Brief and Wondrous Lives of Teach for America Teachers in DISD

Woodrow principal Kyle Richardson lost four TFA-trained teachers -- and went and hired three more.​Teach for America, the nonprofit teacher pipeline founded by Park Cities native Wendy Kopp, has made a couple of appearances in the Morning News lately, first in a news story and then an editoria ... More >>

Poof! A Rundown South Dallas Building Crumbles, Making Way For a Habitat Home.

Photos by Leslie MinoraThe "after" shot, as the former Pete's Sandwich Shop on Baldwin near Fair Park bit the dust. Jump for the "just-before."​As a bulldozer chipped away at the sides of a hideously blighted cinder-block building in South Dallas this morning -- forward, reverse, forward, reverse ... More >>

Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, The Bridge Explain Their Separation to City Council

​On Friday, in a briefing sent to the city council, the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance and the downtown homeless shelter The Bridge announced they would be separating their leadership, something that became effective Saturday. The Bridge is now its own separate non-profit and will be a member of t ... More >>

Slow Your Roll for a $5 Meal That -- Here's the Tricky Part -- Doesn't Involve a Drive-Thru

​ Slow Food USA is a non-profit group that works to bring good, clean and fair food to everyone in the country through grassroots movements. And this Saturday, Sept 17, they're asking you to redefine the value of a meal by participating in a $5 challenge. "... Take back the value meal by ge ... More >>

Oates, Here We Go Magic To Play Upcoming, Three-Day United Way Benefit in Denton

Juan PatinoJohn Oates​I just spent way too much time scouring the Internet for a clip of the classic 1999 Saturday Night Live send-up of Behind The Music where Chris Kattan, playing John Oates, riffs on the fact that, yes, it was very much his idea to add in the handclap parts to Hall & Oates' ... More >>

Mulligans for Mastiffs

Dance Old and New

A National Day of Drinking, Plus a Chili Showdown at Sharky's

The perfect outfit for National Drink Wine Day​There is one holiday that make us so giddy that it's hard for us to get any sleep the night before, and it doesn't involve a fat man in a red suit getting stuck in the chimney. Today is National Drink Wine Day, the one day we can actually claim th ... More >>

O, Chari-tree

Dallas Interfaith Holds the Mother of All Church Potlucks

​According to Dallas Area Interfaith's website, the nonprofit's lobbied for more police officers, organized immigration reform marches and helped house evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. But the network of more than 60 faith institutions -- many of which hold regular socials and suppers -- has n ... More >>

Into the Woods

Match Game: Tomorrow, Communities Foundation of Texas Brings Back "Giving Day"

​The Unfair Park in-box has been filling up all morning with missives from local nonprofits requesting we visit the Donor Bridge TX website tomorrow -- because yet again Communities Foundation of Texas is going to match donations made between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday, otherwise known as "Get Up ... More >>

Tuna Served in Dallas Counts as a Slow Food?

Do edible turtles count as slow food?​An upcoming Dallas fundraiser for Slow Food USA has struck some local food advocates as slightly out-of-step with Slow Food principles. The Slow Food movement, launched by industrial food-opponent Carlo Patrini in 1986, prizes the planet's biodiversity an ... More >>

Walk Of Fame

Local Restaurants Help the Gulf Coast; Mextopia Holds Its Grand Opening This Weekend; Scardello Hosts Top Flight Wines; And More.

Blythe Beck​A few Dallas restaurants are gearing up to help out with Gulf oil spill. Executive chef Blythe Beck at Central 214 starts a new fundraiser today called "We Cook While They Clean." The restaurant will donate $1 from every purchase of the chicken-fried Kobe steak dish to the Gulf R ... More >>

Taste The Fashion

DISD's Running Full-Speed to Reform Through New West Dallas "School Zone"

Patrick MichelsChartering a new course: Mayor Tom Leppert and DISD superintendent Michael Hinojosa this morning at Dallas City Hall​This morning's mayor's breakfast at City Hall featured a parade of speakers covering the need for big-picture reforms in West Dallas education, the sort of shakeups t ... More >>

Appetite For Instruction: Tiramisu Latte

Recipe Demonstrated by Brady Cottle of Urban Dog Coffee ​The workplace can be tricky. When you're first hired on at a new job you cross your fingers hoping you won't have to share an office with a bunch of Dwight Schrute wannabes. You say a little pray before you step off the elevator wishing yo ... More >>

Fa-La-La-La-La

Guerilla Arts in Our Midst

Jennifer Conley/www.iliveindallas.comFrom the opening of Guerilla Arts on Haskell Avenue this weekend​Over on Renegade Bus, Joshua Goode brings word of "a major opening this week that could give the Dallas arts community the extra boost it has long needed": Guerilla Arts on Haskell Avenue, in the ... More >>

Why Can't a Nonprofit Do a Downtown Project Cheaper Than a For-Profit Developer?

Brandon ThibodeauxJohn Greenan, founder and executive director of nonprofit Central Dallas Community Development Corp., a subsidiary of Larry James' Central Dallas Ministries​In the paper version of Unfair Park this week I took a longer look at Re:Vision Dallas -- you know, that self-sustaining de ... More >>

It's a Grind in Deep Ellum is more than just a coffee shop, it's a sanctuary for second chances.

Art Speaks Out

DCAC hosts a life-changing art show

Little Boxes

Brownie Points

Buy some art, do some good

The Good Books

Fast Food Fun Run

Whataburger sponsors a mad Dash

Do The Walk Of Life

Heart Healthy

Don't Mess With Texas

See the last frontiers of the Lone Star State

Strange Fruit

See the faces of Winona at the MAC

Bottled Up

Rolling History

Take a trolley ride in black and white