Five Madison nonprofits you should know about

Groups are providing a range of services, from discounted dental services to classical music training

Did you attend one of Madison’s many neighborhood festivals this summer? They are all run by nonprofits. Go to therapy? You might be getting services through Journey Mental Health Center, a nonprofit since 1948. Take in a play at Overture Center? Forward Theater is a professional nonprofit theater group. 

There are nonprofits all around us, often stepping in when the public and private sectors fall short. Sharon Lezberg, a community development educator with the UW-Madison Division of Extension, Dane County, says nonprofits form the third leg, along with public agencies and private businesses, of what sociologists and other academics often refer to as the “three legged stool of society.”

“So [the nonprofit sector] is super important and it provides services everywhere,” says Lezberg. “It’s not just social welfare — that’s a big part of it, taking care of people living in poverty — but it’s also housing, transportation, environment, arts. The nonprofit sector touches every component of our lives.”

Here is a tiny fraction of some nonprofits you may or may not have heard of, providing services in Dane County today.

Growing STEM careers

When it comes to Maydm, a nonprofit founded in 2015, there is promise and need. 

“In just the tech industry alone, there is a predicted 22% job growth in Madison in the next five years, and with Wisconsin being named a ‘tech hub,’ this is a ripe place to be for those interested in careers in technology and STEM careers at large,” says Melissa Pfahl, development director for Maydm, who notes that Madison is home to such major tech companies as Epic Systems, Google, Fetch Rewards and Raven Software.

But Dane County also has large economic disparities, with the median income for white households (about $80,000) double what it is for Black households. “That is an incredibly stark disparity, and having access to high-paying careers in STEM can help close that wealth gap,” says Pfahl.

That is where Maydm comes in. Pfahl says the group’s strategic approach centers on helping students in grades 6-12 from traditionally underrepresented populations, including girls and students of color, learn about and pursue careers in STEM. “We distinguish ourselves from other organizations through our focus on information technology, video game development, engineering, applied sciences, and lab sciences,” she says.

Programs have included STEMinism, where students develop skills in robotics and virtual reality; Next Gen Scholar, which teaches kids how to use 3D printing; and Video Game Development, which provides an opportunity to work with the leading-edge technology used by developers of such game series as Super Mario and Call of Duty. 

Maydm currently has eight full-time staff members and three part-time work study students, and an operating budget of $900,000. Christina Outlay, who has a background in corporate IT, higher education and nonprofit leadership, has been executive director since 2022. Their office is on South Paterson Street.

Maydm has served more than 3,500 students since its founding, according to Pfahl. This year 470 students are taking part in their programs. The group recently expanded its internship program, and has also deepened its partnerships with local companies and institutions like Madison College’s STEM Academy.

Much of the program’s funding comes from corporate grants and foundations. Like many nonprofits, its federal pandemic funding ends this year so the group is looking at finding alternative funding sources, says Rebecca Hildebrandt, Maydm’s director of operations. The group received $100,000 a year for the last three years, she says. 

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway recently visited Maydm’s Creators Lab program with Joe Gothard, Madison’s new schools superintendent. The high school students in the program did presentations for them and other guests. 

“They showcased not only their amazing projects, some of which included drones, video games, and websites,” says Pfahl, “but also their speaking skills, leadership skills and confidence. I was so proud to watch those students speak about their hard work and with such pride.”

— Jonathan Shipley

‘Intended to cover the uninsured and the underinsured’

Even if people have health insurance, teeth aren’t often covered, says Jason Millis, operations manager at Affordable Dental Care. And if people do have dental insurance, plans often don’t cover enough, adds Millis. “That’s why our clinic is intended to cover the uninsured and the underinsured.”

Affordable Dental Care, a nonprofit dental practice, will open its doors next week in a larger building it renovated in Northgate Shopping Center on Aberg Avenue. The new clinic will double clinical capacity and allow it to bring in new technology, says Millis. 

Founded by Tim Buck in Whitewater in 2009, Affordable Dental Care moved to Madison in 2018 with the help of Dr. Robb Warren of Warren Family Dental. The organization has a $1.4 million budget and nine employees, including a full-time dentist, Dr. Chelsea Kepler, and a part-time dentist, Dr. Chris Stevens. 

The clinical staff also includes a full-time hygienist, full-time and part-time dental assistants, and a bilingual patient care coordinator. There is also administrative staff and some volunteers that help out at the clinic. Jason Krause, the president of the board, is filling in on management duties while the nonprofit seeks its next executive director. 

In 2023, Affordable Dental Care had 2,700 patient visits; 322 of those were for emergencies. Nearly 30% of its patients were Spanish-speaking. 

The organization does not accept private insurance or BadgerCare but offers its services at 50-70% off standard dental practice rates. For patients unable to pay, there is a program that offers up to 80% off of the clinic’s already discounted rates. 

Roughly 54% of the group’s funding comes from patient fees with another 45% coming from grants from government, private foundations, and companies. The organization also holds two fundraisers each year. The Smileathon is done in conjunction with the Madison Marathon in the fall, and Sparkles and Smiles will return in Spring 2026.

Delta Dental of Wisconsin Foundation, the Alexander Company, and the state of Wisconsin Department of Administration, which recently awarded the nonprofit $700,000 through its Grants for Local Projects program, provided the bulk of funding for the group’s new building.

“This has been a long time coming,” says Millis, “and we’re excited to see the results of our work.” 

— Jonathan Shipley

Developing creativity and passion

Studying classical music is linked to positive outcomes, including higher grades and higher levels of civic engagement. But those benefits historically have been out of reach for children of color as well as children with disabilities and those from lower-income families.

The Madison Conservatory aims to democratize access to musical education by providing free classical training in piano and stringed instruments to students in the Madison area.

Co-founded in 2019 by Melanie de Jesus and three other faculty members, the nonprofit organization, with an on-site staff of four, is located on Paterson Street on Madison’s near east side. De Jesus says the centralized location is vital to the organization’s success as it’s right on several bus lines and many of her students use mass transit. The group holds most of its concerts at nearby churches. 

De Jesus, who teaches violin and viola at the Conservatory and has been a coach at the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras for about 14 years, says that when she started teaching privately in Madison she saw too many students who lacked adequate resources and support in their musical endeavors. 

“That’s what led to the development of this project,” she says. “I stopped teaching in my private capacity and teach almost exclusively for the Conservatory because our mission requires that depth of commitment.”

The Conservatory, which has an annual budget of roughly $60,000-$80,000, is funded mostly through individual contributions. “Our alums and their families who have the capacity to donate are pretty generous, and so are other private individuals in the community,” de Jesus says. “We get some smaller arts grants funding from the county and from a few small foundations in Wisconsin.”

All of the funding goes toward providing lessons, instruments and sheet music, as well as helping students with registration fees for competitions, auditions, and participation in other arts organizations like the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras.

The Conservatory accepts as many students as it can, and there is no audition process, de Jesus says. Applications are completed via a Google form. The Conservatory is currently at capacity at 50 students. 

De Jesus says this year’s Conservatory students range in age from 3 to 75, but most are K-12 students. She says her graduating seniors going into a college band or orchestra receive on average $35,000 in scholarships, even if their major isn’t music. 

“My alums who are doing music as a career are doing awesome. But it also helps students develop creativity and passion — all those skills that are necessary to be successful in any profession,” de Jesus says.

De Jesus has sent several of her students off to prestigious musical education programs across the country, including the Peabody Conservatory, the Cleveland Conservatory, the San Francisco Conservatory, the New England Conservatory and Oberlin College. Two students are also at her alma mater: the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. 

De Jesus says raising funds can be a challenge, but she and her fellow teachers are committed to bringing the benefits of studying music to people who might otherwise miss out.

“All of the teachers are trying to provide as much benefit to our students and to the world as possible,” she says. “Kids need to know that someone is rooting for them.”

— Marion Elbow

Serving seniors

NewBridge, a Madison area nonprofit that serves seniors, was founded in 2019 — formed out of four existing nonprofits: the North/Eastside Senior Coalition, West Madison Senior Center, South Madison Coalition of the Elderly and East Madison/Monona Coalition of the Aging. Those groups had been operating since the 1970s, but combining them eliminated confusion and reduced duplication of services, says executive director Jim Krueger. 

The new name was intended to present a positive spin on healthy aging, and emphasize that it serves those 60 and older, “not just the frail elderly,” Krueger says. The downside, perhaps, is the name is less indicative of what NewBridge provides to 3,500 older adults, a range of services from intensive — case management and guardianships — to casual activities. Its staff of 39 (plus two part-time bus drivers) includes 16 case managers and three mental health specialists.

A keystone of NewBridge’s services is its weekday meal sites located around the city. Monday-Friday there are multiple options for a hot meal at noon that also offers an important chance for socializing. “That contact is incredibly important,” says Krueger.

Volunteers help with home chores and deliver groceries from food pantries to qualifying seniors via the Food Bridge program. Foot care clinics take place six times a month. Monday through Friday, daily activities include exercise, cooking, dance and art classes, yoga, mindfulness, euchre, bingo, mah jong and sewing groups. Activities in Spanish include exercise, embroidery and sewing. Krueger notes that the agency’s inclusion of Spanish speakers goes back 40 years.

NewBridge has three offices (north, west and Monona) but its activities and meals take place at more than a dozen sites, including churches, the Madison Senior Center, branch libraries and even the Madison Labor Temple. This year, NewBridge purchased a new minibus to deliver seniors to and from NewBridge activities across the city, fulfilling the group’s mission to make the city more livable for seniors. “We’re very excited about it,” Krueger says.

NewBridge has a budget of $2.8 million, with funding coming from the city of Madison, Dane County, and to a lesser extent Monona, along with the United Way, grants and donations. Whether or not the city budget referendum passes on Nov. 5, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway is proposing to cut 75%  of the $350,000 requested by the agency for 2025 to spread those funds among a greater number of area nonprofits to provide culturally relevant activities among senior BIPOC residents.

Krueger believes funding agencies that serve senior BIPOC populations is helpful and that cooperation among the agencies will increase collaboration. But for NewBridge, the cut will reduce its capacity for case management. Earlier this year NewBridge caught up with a waitlist for case management in effect since before the pandemic; with cuts, the group foresees a return to as much as an 8-10 week waitlist, and serving 80-100 fewer older adults. Funding will also decrease for activities and health screenings, the home chore program, and volunteer guardian training.

“Bottom line, we need more funding for older adults,” says Krueger.

—Linda Falkenstein

‘One of Madison’s great assets’

Think Millennial Park and the Riverwalk in Chicago. That’s how Allen Arntsen, a board member of Madison LakeWay Partners, wants people to imagine the redevelopment potential of the Lake Monona shoreline in downtown Madison. 

“This shoreline is one of Madison’s great assets and we are really here to make that available to people who live in and visit Madison,” says Arntsen. John Nolen Drive, the railroad tracks and the city’s topography currently make accessing Lake Monona from downtown difficult, he points out. “People can’t enjoy the lake.”

The roots of Madison LakeWay Partners date to the 2008 recession when a group of Madison design professionals, with some unexpected time on their hands, started to look for public projects they could contribute their expertise to, says Arntsen. They eventually focused their attention on the Lake Monona shoreline, asking whether the city could connect downtown to Lake Monona and build a park along the lake. 

The group came up with some alternate designs and Downtown Madison Inc., where Arntsen was board chair at the time, helped push the waterfront park project forward as an important civic project. In 2012, it was included in the city’s downtown plan.

With a grant from the Madison Community Foundation, the group hired an engineering firm to do a feasibility study on the project, and in 2018, incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The mission of the group, which recently changed its name from Friends of Nolen Waterfront to Madison LakeWay Partners, is to partner with the city on the lakeshore redevelopment project, raising funds and serving as a project advocate. Pending a governance agreement, it is also expected that the group would help manage programming for the park. The group currently has an annual budget of $200,000.

The group helped fund a design challenge seeking master plans for the 1.7 miles of shoreline and 17 acres of public lakefront along Lake Monona. Sasaki, an international design firm with a focus on waterfront projects, was ultimately selected by the Lake Monona Waterfront Ad-hoc Committee in 2023 and the city adopted the Madison LakeWay Master Plan in 2024. Sasaki’s master plan includes a park over John Nolen Drive from East Wilson Street, featuring an amphitheater and concessions and restroom facilities; construction of separate pedestrian, cycling and running paths on the section of the John Nolen causeway between North Shore Drive and Lakeside Street; and a dock and overlook near Olin Park affording a view of Madison’s skyline. 

The first phase of the project — construction of the causeway paths — would be done in conjunction with the reconstruction of John Nolen Drive, expected to run from 2025-2027. The shoreline work would follow, says Mike Sturm, landscape architect with the city of Madison Parks Division and the project manager. 

Madison LakeWay Partners recently went through a strategic planning process and has hired its first staffer, executive director Jayme Powers, a former executive producer and chief operating officer for the 2018 Special Olympics. The group is also putting together a fundraising plan that will include a capital campaign to raise funds for the first phase of the project. 

The city has budgeted about $6 million for the project’s first phase, and Dane County just approved $2 million for the project as well. Sturm says the projected cost of the first phase won’t be known until schematic designs for the causeway corridor are completed over the next few months. 

Madison LakeWay Partners and the city are working together now to apply for a $20 million U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant to support implementation of the lakeshore master plan.

“Madison is identified by its lakes — they are a unique feature of Madison,” says Arntsen, adding that the Lake Monona shoreline, the most central of any in the city, is one of Madison’s “greatest assets.”

“Everybody knows about the mental health benefits of nature and access to water,” he says. “This should just be a jewel of Madison. It should be one of the top destinations for visitors. It should be a special place. And that’s what we’re working on.” 

— Judith Davidoff

This article is part of The Nonprofit Issue, the special November 2024 print edition of Isthmus. See the other stories here.