We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marie Appel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Marie, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Groundwork DFW was born while I was running political campaigns. I saw that we had so many eager & highly-trained individuals who worked hard during campaign season, but then we had to let go during the non-campaign months. There had to be something useful we could do with them that could both keep them employed and add value to the community.

At the same time, I had grown a little disillusioned with politics and continually asking community members for their vote, when all we brought were promises of what the candidate might do for them in the future. I knew these communities, and grew up in a similar one. These folks had needs now, like hunger, housing, and healthcare, that couldn’t wait years for a politician to get elected and fix. Why couldn’t we flip this model to bring people the resources they needed now?

So that’s what we did. We piloted the idea in 2021, saw it worked & there was a high demand, and launched fulltime in April 2023.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Groundwork DFW is provides data-driven community engagement campaigns. This means our team of 40+ folks from across the metroplex literally go out into their neighborhoods and knock doors, attend community events, and host pop-ups to spread word of mouth. We are a non-profit, so we only do this for resources that benefit the public good and are free to residents.

Examples of previous campaigns include public Pre-K enrollment at the local public school districts, pro-bono legal services to prevent eviction, and multiple community surveys to empower the neighborhood to shape their own future.

Groundwork is a unique combination of efficient & authentic. Our staff are 54% bilingual, 88% female, 100% hired from the neighborhoods we serve, and 100% paid $20+/hr. Rather than outsiders coming into a community to tell them what’s good for them, our staff are literally reaching out to their friends and families to share their experience with the resource themselves. These trusted messengers are then guided efficiently by our high tech data & custom blockwalking app to know which houses and families to reach out to, tracking all of the data down to the door and the minute. This allows Groundwork to be data-driven, pivoting where necessary and constantly gathering insights for our clients about the barriers that community members might be facing to accessing their services.

While Groundwork is a non-profit, we are also unique in the way we are funded. The vasty majority of our funding comes from organizations (such as other non-profits, school districts, healthcare providers, or local governments) hiring us to conduct enrollment, awareness, or survey campaigns in neighborhoods they have struggled to really engage with in the past. In this way, Groundwork runs much more like a business, but one that exists to bring resources to our communities.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think that I really had to unlearn the idea that nonprofits must be dependent on grants and traditional fundraising. That world never totally made sense to me, growing up with my dad as a small business owner & then working with/in nonprofits for about a decade after I left the classroom. The idea of continuing to fundraise, year after year, just seemed counter-intuitive, but I knew that was how it was done.

Recently, I have really been unlearning that way of doing things, and leaning into this less common path with Groundwork. While it may be relatively unique, being a majority earned income nonprofit makes us much more resilient to funding fluctuations. Subsequently, I have had to learn a TON about things like nonprofit law, sales, and accounting to make sure we are still compliant while being innovative.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

I had every intention to go to business school, but the timing & cost/benefit never made sense for me to stop working long enough to go. As a cheap substitute, there are a few books I read every couple years because I love the way they push my thinking around my work:
-Leading with Questions by Michael Marquardt
-The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt & Jeff Cox
– Good to Great (& the sequels) by Jim Collins

When I am feeling uncertain about my business or career path, I also listen to the podcast How I Built This by Guy Raz to hear how other business folks navigated their non-linear career success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.groundworkdfw.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/groundworkdfw
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GroundworkDFW/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/groundwork-dfw/

Image Credits

Photos by Crescent Studios & Jonathan Hernandez.