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Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

8 Questions to Start a Conversation Across Age Divides

8 Questions to Start a Conversation Across Age Divides

Intergenerational collaboration starts with our ability to be in genuine dialogue with one another. Use these questions to have a meaningful conversation with someone you’re just getting to know or someone you’d like to know better. Listen well and be vulnerable.The...

7 Insights from an Age-Diverse Duo Running an Age-Diverse Fellowship

7 Insights from an Age-Diverse Duo Running an Age-Diverse Fellowship

When we first began planning the CoGen Voices Fellowship, we knew we'd face a few challenges. The group of 21 community changemakers was intentionally diverse — by age (15 to 81!), race, location, work, experience, and more. We'd have to meet many different needs and...

Explore These 10 Simple Ways to Cogenerate

Explore These 10 Simple Ways to Cogenerate

At CoGenerate, we believe in the power of cogeneration: a strategy to bring older and younger people together to forge bonds across differences, combat polarization and ageism, and help solve today’s toughest problems. If you’re involved or interested in cogeneration,...

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J. McDonald Williams

Foundation for Community Empowerment
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

Mobilizing people, data, ideas and resources to help low-income communities better themselves

In 1995, J. McDonald Williams, then chair of a Texas-based real estate firm, founded the Foundation for Community Empowerment to help revitalize low-income neighborhoods in Dallas. Partnering with community and faith-based organizations and the public sector, the Foundation focuses on the primarily African American South Dallas/Fair Park neighborhoods. Improvements have been notable: a ten-fold increase in the number of affordable housing permits and in nonprofit homebuilding; a nearly 700 percent increase in the number of low-income three- and four-year-olds in language-rich preschool programs; and higher voter participation. The Foundation is also leading an initiative for the transformation of the Dallas public school system. A $200 million comprehensive revitalization has been launched in the Frazier neighborhood of Dallas, and plans are underway to replicate the Foundation’s model in other neighborhoods, including predominantly Hispanic communities. Now 64, Williams’s goal is to create a successful model of redevelopment that can be replicated throughout Southern Dallas and beyond.