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Ambitious Dreamer Funding Massive Impact
A persistent pacesetter with unrelenting positivity. A volunteer who is unwilling to let his big dreams slip. A nonprofit leader whose board sometimes has to temper his herculean ambition.
These are ways colleagues have described Charlie Wills, co-founder of 100 Men of Dane County and broker at Charlie Wills Team–Real Estate Partners in Madison, Wis. Wills inspired a group of friends who have donated $2.3 million in grants to 26 non-profits in six years. The group of five “knuckleheads,” as Wills calls his co-founders, created the 100 Men platform to award quarterly $100,000 grants to nonprofit organizations that benefit children in the areas of housing, food, education, mental health, and mentoring.
“Creating significant impact and monumental change was the only way we wanted to be relevant,” Wills says. “And every [giving] quarter I tell my wife, ‘I feel like I could run through a wall because of the energy, love and gifts given every time.’ It’s unbelievable.”
Wills decided to focus first on those with the deepest need—children—and to award grants greater than what local charities usually received. This meant setting up the cumulative giving group as a 501(c)(3), 100 Men, and striving for six-figure donations.
A transparent, definitive 15-question survey from 30 grant applicants helps the organization select three finalists, who are invited to submit two-minute videos. Then the 100 members vote over five days to select a winner.
One grant winner, Men-toring Positives, is a youth empowerment organization that uses basketball as the hook to children’s programming. In addition to joining an Amateur Athletic Union basketball team, teens and young adults can participate in discussion groups, gain leadership skills, learn about urban agriculture and find paid work in the organization’s restaurant and food production spaces. Uniquely, kids are the ones responsible for preparing the nonprofit’s salsa and pizzas sold to the public.
Having grown up among young persons who had been incarcerated or adjudicated through the court system, Mentoring Positives Executive Director Will Green says, “I wanted to get on the front end of providing mentorship programming for youth in trouble and trying to keep them out of the system.”
Now that 100 Men is thriving, the members are mentoring a new women’s group, Women’s Collective of Dane County, which will double quarterly donations, to $200,000. Agents who are REALTORS® in Austin and Nashville are following their lead. 100 Men is also building a young men’s program for 18- to 35-year-old professionals.
Half of 100 Men are connected to real estate. “It’s just the heart of most [real estate pros who are] REALTORS® that they feel connected to their communities and want to do well.”