Spring 2025
TCI NEWS
DENTAL CONNECTIONS – TCI FUNDING IN ACTION
Dental Connections - TCI Funding in Action
Grant from Telligen Allows for Expansion of Smile Squad
Oral health is fundamental to the overall well-being and development of children, yet many face barriers to accessing dental care. Challenges such as parents’ work schedules, income limitations, and socio-cultural perceptions prevent many children from visiting a dentist.
The Smile Squad, a school-based mobile dental program established in 2003, is bridging this gap.
With two recreational vehicles retrofitted into dental clinics, the program provides on-site dental services, including exams, cleanings, x-rays, and sealants. By parking these mobile units at schools, parents avoid missing work and students spend less time away from class.
The need for such a program is urgent. Children with poor oral health are 12 times more likely to experience restricted activity days and miss school due to dental pain. In Iowa, the shortage of dentists accepting Medicaid patients further exacerbates disparities, especially in rural areas, where just 14% of dentists accept Medicaid due to low reimbursement rates.
Recognizing these challenges, the Smile Squad plans to expand its reach to rural communities within 60–90 miles of Des Moines, targeting school districts where more than 50% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. In the program’s first year of rural expansion, the goal is to serve more than 1,000students across nine districts.
This expansion has been made possible in part by a grant received from Telligen Community Initiative.These funds will directly support the Smile Squad’s rural outreach efforts, enabling the program to bring vital dental care to underserved areas and improve oral health outcomes for children who need it most.
Building Trust and Equity in Communities
The Smile Squad’s success relies on partnerships with school administrators, nurses, teachers, and families. Informational sessions, outreach materials in multiple languages, and culturally competent care— including Spanish-speaking dental assistants — help build trust and engagement.
Advancing Dental Equity
For over a century, Dental Connections has worked to ensure that every child, regardless of socio-economic status, has access to quality dental care. With its rural expansion and the support of the Telligen grant, the Smile Squad is not just treating teeth — it’s giving students the confidence, health, and focus they need to thrive in school and beyond.
Capacity Building Approvals to Date
Congratulations to Grand Recipients
In 2025, Telligen Community Initiative (TCI) is introducing a new grant making program to advance organizational capacity. Capacity-building proposals are requests for resources to help a nonprofit better fulfill its mission.
Goals often are to adjust the organization’s efficiency, size, or effectiveness. Methods vary, but a good nonprofit seeks to develop and sustain a quality workforce, stable finances, and effective oversight, and is representative of the population it is serving.
TCI wants to provide resources that support this end, which is very different from our historically-focused efforts on project or program implementation. What we would like to support is to find ways to make your nonprofit organization itself more prepared and emboldened to implement its mission. This is not designed as community-based project implementation support (like our traditional RFPs).
This funding opportunity is designed to change things about the inner workings of your organization to account for things not normally seen that will have an impact long after a funding period on structurally changing the work of your organization — those sitting at your governance table, the way you utilize data
for strategy and planning, and to make more equitable approaches to your default way of achieving impact.
TCI decided to make this an invitational funding opportunity for those that achieved finalist status but were not selected in our 2024 Strengthening Families and Communities funding opportunity. Below represents the initial group of capacity building awards made in this new funding stream to date. These seven (7) awards total $173,433. Each individual award is capped at a $25,000 maximum for us to collectively learn from this funding with the intent to adjust in approach going forward.
Congratulations to the grant recipients highlighted below.
Award - $24,500
Location - Oklahoma City, OK
Capacity Building Focus - Organizational strategic planning
Potts Family Foundation is a dual-mission organization with a vision to empower a network of sustainable nonprofits statewide to impact the quality of life for young children. This project will equip the Potts Family Foundation team to support the development of nonprofit leaders and to impact systemic change through asset-based community development.
Award - $25,000
Location - Denver, CO
Capacity Building Focus - Organizational data usage – dashboards & scorecards
We are seeking funding to develop a comprehensive data dashboard that will enhance our organization’s efficiency, decision-making, and long-term sustainability. This dashboard will streamline reporting, automate data collection, and provide real-time insights to improve program tracking, fundraising efforts, and cross-departmental collaboration. This tool will strengthen our capacity to serve more children, optimize resource allocation, and drive greater impact beyond the funding period.
Award - $25,000
Location - Oklahoma City, OK
Capacity Building Focus - Organizational data usage – dashboards & scorecards
Honestly seeks $25,000 to strengthen our digital infrastructure through a two-part initiative that includes updating our website to highlight our new strategic plan, Forward Together, and developing an integrated communication and partner relationship management system to complement this new 5-year plan. The system will integrate with our existing fundraising CRM (eTapestry) to facilitate critical partner activities such as meeting/training registration, evaluation form submission, and contact information management while enabling data-driven decision-making.
United Way of Southwest Colorado
Award - $25,000
Location - Durango, CO
Capacity Building Focus - Voice of lived experiences of program beneficiaries
United Way of Southwest Colorado (UWSWC) succeeds in building collective community change with over 80 local partners through an initiative named Team Up. Team Up exists to improve outcomes for kids and families, and we believe we can increase our positive impact by building a better method of welcoming authentic engagement with community members with lived experience, and to learn how to advocate for promising strategies and policies at all levels of community and government. This capacity-building support will help us take significant steps toward making these components integral parts of how we operate to be most effective.
Award - $25,000
Location - Wheaton, IL
Capacity Building Focus - Fund development planning and staffing
Our goal is to actively engage current donors and cultivate others so that NAMI DuPage will have sustainable resources to meet the increased need for our mental health/substance use disorder services. Currently, NAMI DuPage is almost entirely funded by private or local government grants (we receive no state or federal funding at this time) and individual donations, but many of our donors are aging and we have not had the resources to cultivate new donors nor actively pursue a legacy program or properly research and apply to other funding sources. This project approaches revenue enhancement from several different angles and seeks utilizing consultants who bring new ideas/connections, which will be transformative in our ability to move forward in a position of financial strength and sustainability.
Award - $24,733
Location - Steamboat Springs, CO
Capacity Building Focus - Evaluation planning and capturing data impacts of work
Better Tomorrow serves as the supportive foundation for our four direct services programs. This Capacity request is meant to assist us in identifying impact measurements to evaluate how effective the Better Tomorrow model is. This project will allow us to better understand the overall impact of our organization and increase our effectiveness at serving vulnerable individuals within our rural community.
Award - $24,200
Location - Des Moines, IA
Capacity Building Focus - Staffing burnout avoidance – executive coaching or sabbaticals
EveryStep seeks funding to support leadership training for the organization’s management team who serve statewide. This effort will assist in avoiding non-profit burnout and increasing nonprofit sector resiliency by providing access to education, coaching, and strategies to increase workforce productivity, reduce staff turnover, help manage change, improve company culture, and lay the foundation for future leadership at higher levels.
Focus of Capacity Building Applications
The following represents a depiction of the capacity building applications to date and aggregates their focus to start to show the types of efforts within this applicant field that are seeking capacity assistance:
Strengthening Families & Communities
Excellent Response from Oklahoma & Illinois
On March 3, Telligen Community Initiative had our first large grant deadline of the year for Strengthening Families and Communities applicants from throughout both Illinois and Oklahoma. Though selected grantees will not be determined until mid-May, the following provides a summary of the applicant field and response.
Our thinking in sharing this aggregated data is to begin to help Iowa- and Colorado-focused applications that have a deadline for projects by October 15 (Logon - Grant Lifecycle Manager). This also represents our first funding cycle accepting projects for multi-year period of funding and adjusting our funding focus entirely to the healthy birth outcomes and parenting resiliency/Adverse Childhood Experiences avoidance.
If any of this creates questions about the projects you might be planning, please always feel free to reach out to TCI staff to discuss your funding and project needs.
Average Grant Requests: The following highlights the average grant request across the full applicant field (177) along with the average of overall organizational budget size for the field.
· Average grant request = $141,150 (versus our new $150,000, 2-year request maximum)
· Average overall organizational budget of the applicant field: $22.8 million
Geographic Focus of Applications: It is common for TCI to receive requests that focus from something as small as a neighborhood or census tract on up to efforts that have true statewide reach. The following offers a summary of the distribution of geographic focus for the projects received from throughout Illinois and Oklahoma during this funding cycle.
· City reach: 61 applications (34.5%)
· Multi-county reach: 52 applications (29.4%)
· Statewide reach: 33 applications (18.6%)
· County-wide reach: 31 applications (17.5%)
TCI Priority Focus Distribution of the Applicant Field: The following speaks to the priority distribution of the entire applicant field from applications received for the March 3 deadline. At this point, TCI is not prioritizing among these sub-priority focus areas as much as seeing how four (4) quite different states elect to interpret our Request for Proposals in 2025. Please view the below as a demand analysis of the applications received year-to-date in 2025.
Parent Resiliency / Adverse Childhood Experiences Avoidance (132 total applications):
· Parent Skill Development – Abuse and Neglect Avoidance: 38 applications (28.8%)
· ACEs Interventions (such as Medical-Legal Partnerships): 37 applications (28%)
· Social Drivers of Health Screening and Referrals: 24 applications (18.2%)
· Older Adult-Focused Projects: 21 applications (16%)
· Home Visitation Projects: 12 applications (9%)
Healthy Birth Outcomes (45 total applications):
· Pregnancy and Prenatal Care: 13 applications (28.9%)
· Birth Worker Advancement: 11 applications (24.4%)
· Unintended Pregnancies, STI Avoidance/Youth Sexual Health Literacy: 6 applications (13.3%)
· Birthing Environments: 6 applications (13.3%)
· Well Child Visits: 5 applications (11.1%)
· Reducing Prematurity: 2 applications (4.4%)
· Contraception Education and Access: 2 applications (4.4%)
For more information, please visit our website at https://www.telligenci.org
