In today’s professional sports landscape, impact isn’t optional. Fans expect their favorite teams to do good work in their communities.
Angel City is unique, however, in how core impact is to its mission. For ACFC, impact isn’t just a stated goal, but an ethos that’s built into the structure of the organization.
Early on in the club’s existence, when the 11 players on the field were still an abstraction, President Julie Uhrman consulted with Renata Simril, the president of the LA84 Foundation. Uhrman wanted to find out how ACFC could structure its impact arm to truly embed itself in the community and form deep, long-term relationships with the people doing the work on the ground.
Simril’s answer was twofold: first, ask what potential partners need. Too often, philanthropists show up in a community and drop off a one-time gift without any real understanding of what that community needs. Wanting to avoid that,ACFC staff, including Uhrman, visited the organizations and neighborhoods they wanted to support. That listening tour was key in the early planning stages, and remains a crucial part of the club’s impact model.
Second, said Simril, structure fundraising into the business itself. That would ensure a stable source of funding and let the community team break away from the fundraising cycles other foundations are chained to. That’s the inspiration for the Angel City FC 10% Sponsorship Model, where each sponsor chooses a specific area of impact and works with Angel City to identify partner organizations working on that issue.
According to Chris Fajardo, ACFC’s senior director of community impact, that structure has been transformative in how it allows the team to engage with the community. “Because our fundraising is baked into the actual business structure, my job isn't to raise money, it's to develop, maintain, and cultivate relationships,” he says.
Initiatives supported by the 10% Model fall into three broad categories: essentials, equity, and education.
Up first: essentials. Programs in this category focus on food security, sporting equipment, and transportation. Head of Community Catherine Dávila cites Goals that Give, the club’s meal delivery project in partnership with DoorDash, as an example. Through the partnership, the club has delivered hundreds of thousands of meals to people who are homebound or otherwise don’t have access to fresh, high-quality food at home.
ACFC partners with two nonprofits, All Peoples Community Center (APCC) in South LA, and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, on the program, and the impact goes even deeper than it might seem at first glance. “We had many conversations with All Peoples Community Center,” says Fajardo. “They identified a need for for support in their food security programing, and a core piece of that was they needed staffing support. So unlike the majority of funders that exist, we said, ‘we hear you. Let's help you get somebody on your staff to support this work.’”
APCC created a new position to take over four programs that had been operated by four different people. “We originally together had a goal of 80,000 meals to be distributed between April and December of this year,” continues Fajardo. “We're already at 319,000. And the reason for that is the dedicated oversight that is now able to happen under this person. They’re able to more closely monitor and track their impact on the community.” That’s just one example of how the club is thinking above and beyond traditional impact models.
Another example falls under the equity pillar, where Dávila highlights the club’s work on play equity, supported by Cedars-Sinai. Three community groups are involved with the partnership: Football for Her (FFH), Girls Play LA (GPLA), and the Girls Play Leadership Academy.
“We thought about what is most authentic to us, and where does it feel like we have natural expertise?” Dávila says. “Where do we have natural connections where we can really do good work that's tied to who we are?” One answer, unsurprisingly, is in soccer, which is extremely popular throughout the Southland, but is often prohibitively expensive.
Football for Her is a nonprofit started by former NWSL player Shawna Palmer, who saw a major need for soccer coaching and playing space aimed at girls and nonbinary kids, especially those who can’t afford the high costs associated with traditional clubs. The cornerstone of her program is Footy Fridays, a free weekly event where girls and gender-expansive youth play pickup futsal, receive coaching from female coaches, and hear from guest speakers, including Angel City players.
“With all of these programs,” says Dávila, “we’re looking at, just because the program's there, doesn't mean kids can come. So how do we address those barriers as well?”
With GPLA, a program of the LA Department of Recreation and Parks that runs leagues throughout the city, the club aims to expand what they’ve done at an initial site, in Expo Park, to sites across the city. “We are holding a high standard for our soccer that's being offered through that program,” says Fajardo. “And it’s holistic.” Nurturing the relationships between kids and coaches is one crucial piece, and this year—in partnership with FFH—GPLA and Angel City rolled out the Soccer Leadership Academy, an eight-week program that helps high schoolers build leadership skills in addition to practicing soccer.
Finally, programs under the education pillar are wide-ranging, focusing on coach training, career readiness, and mentorship, among other things.
A prime example, says Fajardo, is the club’s financial literacy work with APCC, which is in partnership with Crypto.com. “Our relationship with Crypto.com, for obvious reasons, is thinking about cryptocurrency and bringing it to the community,” says Fajardo. “What we brought to our contacts at Crypto.com early on was that a lot of our community partners are not in a place where they're necessarily ready to learn about cryptocurrency. There's foundational learning that needs to happen first.”
To start building that foundation, Crypto.com is funding two financial literacy programs at APCC, one aimed at youth and the other at a group of women community leaders.
In the youth program, kids learn about the basics of financial wellness, including saving money. This fall, for example, participants are saving a few dollars each week to put towards a holiday fund that they’ll use to buy presents for their families. “What All Peoples Community Center has found is that if they educate the kids, that information gets passed on to their parents, especially if there's workshops that are engaging their parents outside of the youth classes,” says Fajardo.
On the other end of the generational spectrum, APCC is also engaging MEJOR, a group of 14 women who initially came together to work on domestic violence, but now focus on finances, investment, and savings. “They are individually using this group to create their own savings for their families,” says Fajardo, “and then collectively they are creating a rainy-day emergency fund that anyone from the group can tap into.” Similar to the youth classes, the goal here is to have an impact well beyond the group actually enrolled in the program by tapping into the existing relationships participants have with their communities.
“They are a group of trusted women from the community that are looked to as leaders,” says Fajardo. This winter, Crypto.com plans to lead a bilingual workshop introducing cryptocurrency to that group.
The aim with all three pillars is to build broader and deeper connections than more traditional impact models. The three also support each other in looking holistically at what how ACFC can serve local communities.
Equity, for example, is impossible without essentials. “Before anybody can think about setting foot on a pitch, says Dávila, “they have to have a full belly. They have to feel safe. They have to be able to get there.”
Education—as demonstrated by the GPLA Soccer Leadership Academy and the APCC financial literacy programs—also ties back into the other pillars. “It’s about, looking to the future, how are we going to empower our community to be stewards of their own lives?” says Fajardo.
It all sounds good in principle, but what about the bottom line—how has the 10% Model shaped the way the club engages potential sponsors? Fajardo says that in his experience, companies are excited to participate in the new model.
“I think it’s the innovative way that we have approached creating our community impact has really impressed and and surprised companies,” he says. “It's so different in this world of many sports teams that all do it in a very similar way.”
In some cases, an insistence on partnering with brands that share Angel City’s values has meant the club has turned potential sponsors down. Last month, Jess Smith, Angel City’s head of revenue, told SportBusiness, “we’ve walked away from many conversations with brands where it felt like they want to partner with us and use that 10% to show something that is disingenuous to what their company was or what their product was. That’s important for us.”
It all ties back to the core of ACFC's impact philosophy: building, deep, authentic, long-term relationships in the community—and we're just getting started.
