The Partnership Behind the Good

Social Good Consulting Group launched on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025 — a deliberate choice, and a fitting one. Before SoGoCo was a firm, it was a partnership between two people who had spent their careers advancing equity, access, and community vitality across higher education and North Texas nonprofits. Their strengths pull in complementary directions, and that’s exactly the point: relationships and operations, vision and follow-through, the big idea and the details that make it hold. Here are the people you’ll work with.

Audryanna Reed — Partner & Co-Founder

Audryanna is a community engagement strategist and operations leader who makes sure good intentions become measurable outcomes. She leads SoGoCo’s work in strategic planning, assessment, and community engagement — the systems, structure, and details that keep impact durable long after a project ends. She holds a BS in Hospitality Management from the University of North Texas and a Master of Liberal Studies from SMU, with concentrations in Human Rights & Social Justice and Organizational Dynamics. She is now pursuing her Juris Doctorate from The George Washington University.

Audryanna’s expertise is rooted in place-based community engagement. At SMU she served as Associate Director for High-Impact Practices and as Initiative Manager for Engage Dallas, where she built and stewarded partnerships with 36+ North Texas nonprofits and led the curriculum, policy, and operational infrastructure behind them. She shifts organizations from service-to-the-community toward genuine partnership-with-the-community — and then builds the operating model that lets it last.

Dr. Dustin K. Grabsch — Partner & Co-Founder

Dustin is a pracademic — equal parts practitioner and researcher — who leads SoGoCo’s work in leadership development, research, and assessment. A proud first-generation college student from Warren, Michigan, he holds a BS in Leadership Studies, an MA in Student Development Administration, and a PhD in Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication.

Over more than a decade, Dustin has held academic and student-affairs leadership roles at five universities — Southern Methodist University, Texas A&M, Seattle University, the University of Arkansas, and Texas Tech — and currently serves as Assistant Vice President for University Initiatives at The University of Texas at Dallas. He leads social-science research teams whose work has been cited 400+ times and has shaped policy and practice around high-impact educational practices, student success, and an identity-centered approach to leadership. On any engagement, Dustin is the one building the relationships and translating evidence into strategy that people actually rally behind.

What they share

Together, Dustin and Audryanna have architected university-wide, place-based engagement strategies, mobilized grant funding for community resource centers, and helped congregations, campuses, and companies turn purpose into action. They founded SoGoCo on a single conviction: meaningful change happens when strategy and equity come together.

Social Good Consulting Group helps causes, companies, and communities create more good. Ready to collaborate? Book a free 30-minute discovery call →

If you lead a nonprofit in Dallas–Fort Worth, you don’t need us to tell you that 2025 and 2026 have felt different. But “feeling different” isn’t a strategy — data is. So we pulled together the numbers behind the moment because the story they tell is more specific and more actionable than the general anxiety floating around the sector.

Here’s the headline: the assumptions underneath DFW nonprofit business models are inverting. The revenue streams we treated as stable have become volatile, and the streams we treated as episodic are proving surprisingly durable. Organizations that see this inversion clearly — and restructure around it — will be the ones still standing (and serving) in 2028.

Let’s walk through it.

First, remember the scale of what we’re talking about

The greater Dallas metro is home to roughly 49,000 nonprofit organizations that employ more than 333,000 people, generate over $77 billion in annual revenue, and hold $184 billion in assets (Cause IQ).

But that top-line number hides a critical structural fact: the sector is deeply bifurcated. Organizations with more than $100 million in revenue — overwhelmingly hospital systems, specialty health providers, and large charter networks — capture about 72.5% of all nonprofit earnings in the region. Organizations under $1 million? Just 2.5%.

Why does this matter? Because when you read that “the sector” is holding steady, that average is being carried by a handful of institutional giants. The small and mid-sized, community-embedded organizations — the ones doing frontline equity work in housing, food security, reentry, youth development, and neighborhood health — live in a completely different economic reality. And that’s exactly where the current disruption is landing hardest.

The $127 million problem

In 2025, three of the region’s community foundations — the North Texas Community Foundation, Communities Foundation of Texas, and The Dallas Foundation — did something unusual: they jointly surveyed the region’s nonprofits about funding losses. The finding: North Texas nonprofits lost an estimated $127 million in the first six months of 2025 alone, most of it from federal sources (Fort Worth Report; KERA News).

The stories behind that number make it concrete:

Meals on Wheels of Tarrant County lost roughly $1.5 million in federal pass-through dollars for FY2025 and another $500,000 for FY2026 — against a total budget of about $14 million. The organization has already reduced staff and adjusted service frequency.
The North Texas Food Bank absorbed the loss of nearly $10 million in USDA local food purchasing support — while its annual food spending has ballooned from roughly $5 million pre-pandemic to $25–30 million today, driven by both demand and inflation (KERA News).
The 2025 federal government shutdown — the longest in U.S. history — compounded everything, driving up demand for food and housing assistance at precisely the moment federal reimbursements were delayed.

And here’s the deeper shift, captured by the CEO of Partnership Home (formerly the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition): federal funding used to be the stable part of the portfolio. Nobody in the field treats it that way anymore.

That’s not a budget problem. That’s a paradigm problem. When your most reliable revenue stream becomes your least predictable one, every downstream assumption — staffing models, program commitments, cash reserves, board risk tolerance — needs to be re-examined.

It’s not just federal dollars

Three additional pressures are converging on the same organizations at the same time:

Individual giving is softening at the margins: Some direct-service organizations reported declines in community donations of roughly 20% in 2025, which leaders attribute to broad economic uncertainty. Longtime donors are telling reporters they’re cutting their annual giving list from five or six organizations down to one.
The workforce is contracting — and leaders are exhausted: Nationally, the nonprofit sector shed at least 22,757 full-time jobs in the first five months of 2025 (Chronicle of Philanthropy, via KERA). The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2026 report adds that nonprofit CEOs are reporting escalating burnout and say foundation grants have become harder to secure since January 2025. Demand up, funding down, people stretched: that’s the burnout formula.
Tax policy is quietly redrawing the donor map: New federal tax provisions cut in both directions: an expanded charitable deduction for non-itemizers could activate the ~90% of Americans who don’t itemize, while new floors and caps for itemizing donors — and restrictions on corporate deductions — may dampen enthusiasm at the top of the giving pyramid (PNC Insights). Translation: broad-based, small-dollar strategies just got more valuable, and major-gift pipelines just got less automatic.

The equity dimension we can’t ignore

Put the pieces together, and a troubling pattern emerges. The organizations most exposed to federal disruption — human services, housing, food access, refugee support — are disproportionately the small and mid-sized organizations serving the region’s most vulnerable neighbors. They’re also the organizations with the thinnest reserves, the least fundraising infrastructure, and the smallest share of the region’s philanthropic capital.

Meanwhile, the funding cuts don’t reduce need — they increase it, because the same federal retrenchment that defunds nonprofits also shrinks the safety net (SNAP delays, housing assistance gaps) that kept demand manageable.

In other words, the disruption is regressive. It concentrates harm on the organizations and communities least positioned to absorb it. Any regional response that doesn’t name this explicitly will end up reinforcing the very disparities the sector exists to address.

So is it all bad news?

No — and that’s the subject of our companion post. Because here’s the remarkable thing: in the same year all of this unfolded, North Texans showed up for North Texas Giving Day in record-breaking numbers — more than 94,000 donors, $74.2 million, 3,500 participating nonprofits, all records.

The community’s generosity infrastructure is functioning as a shock absorber, exactly when the federal system stopped absorbing shocks. What that means for your organization’s strategy — revenue diversification, collaboration, corporate alignment, and the once-in-a-generation wealth transfer — is where we turn next.

Social Good Consulting Group partners with nonprofits, funders, and cross-sector coalitions to build equitable, evidence-based strategies for lasting community impact. If your organization is navigating funding disruption and wants a thought partner — not just a report — let’s talk.

At Social Good Consulting Group, we believe in the power of collaboration to create meaningful and lasting social impact. Our mission is simple yet profound: to partner with causes, companies, and communities to drive positive change. Whether it’s advancing equity, fostering sustainable development, or catalyzing innovative solutions, we’re here to make a difference—and we invite you to join us in doing more good.

When you connect with Social Good Consulting Group, you become part of a dynamic network of changemakers, strategists, and thought leaders who share a commitment to social impact. Together, we amplify efforts to solve complex challenges, leveraging evidence-based approaches and creative problem-solving to empower communities and organizations alike. Here’s how you can get involved:

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Collaborate on Projects: Partner with us on strategic initiatives that align with your skills and values.
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Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025, we are proud to announce the founding of the Social Good Consulting Group. This moment marks the beginning of a journey fueled by a commitment to justice, equity, and progress—values that Dr. King championed and that continue to inspire us.

Why Today Matters

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned a world where all individuals could live with dignity, opportunity, and freedom. His tireless work for civil rights, his unwavering belief in the power of community, and his call for action in the face of injustice serve as guiding principles for our mission. By launching Social Good Consulting Group on this day, we honor his legacy and reaffirm our commitment to advancing meaningful social change.

Who We Are

Social Good Consulting Group is a strategy consulting organization dedicated to partnering with causes, companies, and communities for social impact. We believe in the power of collaboration and the importance of evidence-based solutions to address some of society’s most pressing challenges. Our work is grounded in the principles of:

Equity: Ensuring fairness and inclusion in all that we do.

Innovation: Thinking creatively to solve complex problems.

Sustainability: Creating lasting impact for the communities we serve.

What This Day Represents to Us

Starting on MLK Day is more than a symbolic gesture—it is a promise to keep Dr. King’s vision alive in our work. We aim to:

Champion Justice: Supporting initiatives that dismantle systemic inequities.

Empower Communities: Amplifying the voices of those most affected by social challenges.

Catalyze Change: Partnering with organizations to create sustainable, transformative solutions.

Looking Ahead

The road to equity and justice is long, but it is a path worth taking. Today, we embark on this journey with hope, determination, and the belief that collective action can create a brighter future for all.

As Dr. King said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” Let’s do what is right—together.

Join us as we empower the world to do more good. Learn more about us and what we do at socialgoodconsultinggroup.org.