Deeper, Not Bigger: How to Make the Case for Capacity

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391

October 22, 2026

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Deeper, Not Bigger: How to Make the Case for Capacity

Episode Summary

Most capital campaigns fund something new, a building, a wing, more seats. Jimmy McQuilkin, Founder and Executive Director of UrbanPromise Charlotte, built a six-million-dollar campaign to fund something nonprofit leaders rarely ask for: getting better. McQuilkin traces his path from a Teach For America classroom to a summer running UrbanPromise Honduras, and the 2013 leap that became UrbanPromise Charlotte’s twenty-year model of reaching, raising and restoring through its Street Leader program. He walks through the strategic planning process that surfaced three tensions, pandemic-strained families, an overloaded team and infrastructure that hadn’t kept pace, and how that became the Rooted for Restoration campaign, now past six million dollars, with Armstrong McGuire’s feasibility study and an early gift that funded staff salary increases before public fundraising even began. Listeners will walk away with a model for asking donors to invest in quality and people, not just capacity for more.

About Jimmy

Jimmy McQuilkin is Founder and Executive Director of UrbanPromise Charlotte, which has grown from one site to four across the city, serving nearly 700 children, youth, and young adults through a twenty-year model built around its Street Leader program, where high schoolers are employed and mentored to lead the younger students coming up behind them. A Spanish and economics double major at Wake Forest University, he came to Charlotte through Teach For America, teaching Spanish and coaching basketball for four years at Philip O. Berry High School, before a summer running UrbanPromise Honduras convinced him to found UrbanPromise Charlotte in 2013. Thirteen years in, he now leads the organization’s six-million-dollar-plus Rooted for Restoration campaign. He also walked on to Wake Forest’s basketball team as a student manager, something he describes, self-deprecatingly, as his own version of Rudy.