Greenlights Celebrates 10 Years!

On October 12, 2011, we celebrated 10 years of service to Central Texas nonprofits with nearly 300 of Greenlights' friends and family. As part of our 10th Anniversary Celebration, we honored a group of key founders while raising $65K for our new Research and Innovation Fund.

At the event, we premiered "The Greenlights Office", a video portraying a day in the life of Greenlights (channeling NBC’s “The Office”). Check out photos from the event and our event recap.

How Greenlights got its Name

Little did they know they had already discovered their organization's future name.
By David Wenger

In early 2001, I was approached by a just-formed nonprofit operating under the name Austin Nonprofit Resource Network. Like many new organizations they had started with a name that quickly lost its edge as important decisions were made about the nature and direction of the initiative. They didn't want to be tied solely to the Austin metropolitan area, so having Austin in the name wasn't ideal. The rest of the name was reasonably descriptive, but frankly boring, and they knew it. No one wanted to become the lifeless ANRN (nonprofits often gravitate towards acronyms, an approach that drains the life out of their personality).

Step one, the photo analogy.

We gathered one morning in my conference room, Deborah Edward their energized and insightful new director, and several members of their startup board. I began the session by spreading a couple of dozen photos on the table in front of them. These were clipped from photography annuals and included many imaginative and evocative scenes. I told the group that each of them should pick one photo and use it to create their first advertisement for the organization.

Read more.