Editorial: The rise of a young nonprofit
Not that long ago, the nonprofit Legendary Legacies was little more than just a whiteboard idea from Co-founder Ron Waddell, at the time an employee of the Worcester Community Action Council. That idea eventually blossomed in 2018 with the founding of an organization focused on helping men aged 17-24 become productive citizens through mentorship and other programming, particularly young men of color.
By 2020, the nonprofit had grown enough for it to become Waddell’s full-time job, although its annual revenues were still just $97,000, with Waddell hoping to eventually exceed $210,000, both numbers a far cry from the hundreds of millions in revenues brought in each year by major Central Mass. human services nonprofits. In the wake of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the subsequent calls for social justice and the elimination of institutional racism, donations flowed in nationally to Black-led nonprofits, particularly those helping underserved communities. On the local level, Waddell saw a small trickle of that money, as Legendary Legacies received $10,000 from the Worcester Together Fund to run a grocery delivery program to Black communities and the elderly.
When it came time in spring 2021 for Worcester Together to distribute the final $1 million of its coronavirus-specific giving, the fund chose five established nonprofits and one upstart: Legendary Legacies, which received $125,000 to create a youth-led civic engagement academy aimed at increasing voter registration and turnout among 18-25 year olds. Yet, more was to come.
On July 16, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Bureau of Substance Abuse announced Legendary would receive $1.3 million to scale its Legendary Links program, which assists Black and Latino men returning home from incarceration. Legendary plans to hire five new staff members to run the program.
Waddell and his nonprofit have come a long way in a seemingly short amount of time.
In the past year, the increased focus on diversity & inclusion have yielded countless well-intentioned statements and attempts to simply be better as a people and a culture. However, concrete successes have been hard to come by in the seemingly never-ending struggle to fix the cracks in the foundation of American society. Given Waddell’s connections in the community, his commitment to his cause, and growing reputation among the region’s power brokers, Legendary Legacies likely would have been a success regardless, although likely on a longer timeline. Fortunately, the societal problems laid bare by Floyd’s murder led enough people and organizations to want to help address those problems.
And that renewed focus aided in the rise of a promising young nonprofit, whose impact will surely grow.
WBJ Web Partners
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