Impact 100 Pensacola Bay Area is world's largest chapter, with an impact to match

*Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the current Impact 100 president.

For roughly 20 years, Impact 100 groups all over the globe have been pooling their money together and donating it to worthy nonprofits.

And arguably, no one chapter has had a greater impact on their local nonprofits than Impact 100 Pensacola Bay Area, which has awarded 142 grants totaling over $15 million to charitable organizations in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties.

“We want to make sure that we have the best organization to meet the needs of providing excellent philanthropy in our area and that's really our goal,” Kristin Longley, president of Impact 100 Pensacola Bay Area said. “We want to set a great example. We want to make sure that we're serving not only the nonprofit organizations in our area, but also the broader community.”

To celebrate the achievements of Pensacola and other Impact 100 organizations around the world, Impact 100 founder Wendy Steel visited Pensacola to celebrate the organization's 2022 Global Day of Impact.

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The event, held at WSRE in Pensacola State College and live streamed around the world, highlighted the work of the more than 60 chapters of Impact 100 around the globe that have collectively dispersed over $123 million since the organization's founding in 2001.

“Nonprofit leaders today are stretched in the demands for their services, for the work they do is growing at an unprecedented pace and they need funding in order to be effective,” Steele told the News Journal. “The Impact 100 grants are designed to allow those nonprofit leaders to pick their head up from their desk, to really look out to the horizon and execute on a strategic plan, to really move the needle and serve the communities that so desperately need their help.”

Impact 100 began in 2001 in Cincinnati, Ohio, when Steele learned the women around her did not see a viable path for themselves to get involved in community service and philanthropy.

But Steele noted that since the early days of our nation, women have made great strides and taken prominent roles in leadership, business and society.

“As women, we need to flex that muscle," Steele said. "We need to learn and strengthen what it feels like to be a part of the solution in a powerful way by writing those checks (to organizations creating change).”

So she came up with a plan: gather at least 100 women who would each donate $1,000. Then, that $100,000 could be pooled together and given away in a grant to local nonprofits across five broad focus areas — education, arts, culture and family, environment and recreation, family, and health and wellness.

The model proved to be wildly successful and has spread not just across the U.S., but also to the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Impact 100 Pensacola Bay Area

Impact 100 found its way to Pensacola in 2003 when Debbie Ritchie read a People’s Magazine article about Impact 100 in Cincinnati.

She loved the concept and wanted to bring it to Pensacola. Ritchie was part of a four woman crew who by the following year was able to have their first giveaway.

Steele said even from the beginning, it was a group of "overachievers." In its first year, Impact 100 Pensacola Bay recruited 233 members and give away $233,000.

Now Pensacola is the largest Impact 100 chapter in the world, and has given more than $15 million to 96 different local nonprofits.

“I think we found over the years — we often refer to it as the impact of Impact — residual things that happen that we never expected would happen, and that's one of them, that women would begin to feel more empowered about their giving,” Ritchie said. “They weren't making philanthropic decisions because their husbands were making those decisions. They were getting educated, they were getting passionate about what they were learning and they were feeling that they wanted to make a decision about how to give that grant.”

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The General Daniel Chappie James Flight Academy, Inc. was a 2022 grant recipient and received $103,820 from Impact 100. The grant will help with the expansion of the Flight Academy to serve more students and to add flight simulators, workstations, instructor stations, state of the art monitors, smart boards and more improvements before the conclusion of 2023.

Cliff Curtis, the flight academy director, said he is thankful for Impact 100 for everything it has done to take care of the community and to provide opportunity to the people in it.

“I think everybody cares about their community, their neighborhood and it takes a real effort from organizations like Impact 100, like Chappie James Flight Academy, like a lot of other nonprofits to be able to do the work,” Curtis said. “It's impossible for a community to grow if we just all sit back and expect things to happen on their own because that's just not how the world works. So, we have to come together as a community if you want a better place to live.”

For more information about Impact 100 Pensacola Bay Area, including how to join or apply for a grant, go impact100pensacola.org or attend one of their Meet and Mingle events.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Impact 100 celebrates 20 years of philanthropy in Pensacola