BearFruit specializes in fundraising and marketing strategy, grant writing and donor research to help charities, nonprofits and social impact organizations raise more money.
RIPE WRITING MARKETING FOR IMPACT.
About BearFruit
Our team is hungry to help you plant the seeds that bear fruit – so you can raise the funding to make a deep, long-lasting impact on the communities you serve.
We are particularly passionate about working with causes that focus on poverty alleviation, helping children, and education.
Every important opportunity to attract additional resources requires a sharp fundraising and marketing strategy, and excellent writing. Our team adeptly communicates your needs, impact and why you are worthy of investment in a compelling and clear way.
Rooted in our many years of experience working with donors and grantors, we help tell your story effectively to increase financial support for your organization.
Our team prides itself on being entrepreneurial, thoughtful, diligent and transparent in everything we do. Most of all, we operate with a growth mindset, laser-focused on helping you fund your mission and programs.
Together, we will plant the seeds that bear fruit for years to come.
Together, we will plant the seeds that bear fruit for years to come.
BearFruit Services
- Fundraising & Marketing Strategy
- Grants Strategy, Writing & Management
- Donor Research & Prospecting
We help organizations retain, grow and find funding for their mission.
Depending on who you are, it could include designing a strategy to deepen your donor relationships, advising on how to communicate and market your mission to the right audiences, or handling your grants needs.
Maybe it’s all three.
The goal of your fundraising and marketing strategies is to generate more opportunities to ask for funding. Most of the time, you will need to write your request – whether a proposal, LOI, grant or presentation.
We want you to be ready.
Our team builds, maintains and/or fine-tunes your organization’s writing and communications repository, according to your needs, fundraising strategy and vision for impact. We manage and strengthen your grants and fundraising program for your government, corporate, foundation and/or individual funding requests.
Operating with a journalist’s thirst for information, we want to understand your mission and impact, inside out. It is our responsibility to embody all you stand for as we present your organization to the funding community.
We are intensely organized and strategic about helping you steward funders – now and for the future. Equally as important, we are thorough and data-driven in articulating to funders that you have put their investment to good use and have met their goals and requirements.
BearFruit’s Approach
At its core, successful fundraising – and life in general, for that matter – is about relationships. Therefore, it is important that we understand your relationships with funders and how you navigate them to seek investment in your mission. Simply, it is about aligning your mission and programming to those funders who are the most interested in what you do and the issues you help solve.
Our approach starts with understanding your needs. We ask a lot of questions about your fundraising, marketing and grant writing such as:
- How you ask for funding – key messages, the need you address, your impact and outcomes, your positioning in the market
- Why funders invest in your cause
- What separates your organization and services from others
- Your strategic framework/vision
From there, we build the strategy and organize all the writing, supporting materials and budgets so we can help you easily apply for funding – on deadline and tailored to each funder. We want to help you take care of current funders, find ways to grow their giving by making a strong case for additional support, and research new funding opportunities to support your mission.
We don’t just sit behind a desk. We are strategic and proactive in how we think about supporting and augmenting your funding needs.
Sam Alpert
CEO
Sam has spent his 20-year career as a fundraiser, writer and marketing executive. His purpose in life, and his drive, come from helping others and making an impact on the world.
As the Chief Development Officer and lead fundraiser for Junior Achievement of Arizona for 10 years, Sam guided the organization to its most successful fundraising in history, fueling its impact on more than 170,000 K-12 students annually. During his tenure, Sam re-designed the fundraising team, and together, they nearly tripled annual giving and raised more than $40 million to support programming, launch new initiatives, drive innovation, and expand reach. He played a key role in transforming the organization into a cutting-edge leader in career and financial literacy education for children, making it one of the top-performing Junior Achievement chapters out of 102 offices in the United States.
Previously, Sam co-founded and managed an advertising and public relations agency whose clients included Make-A-Wish, Habitat for Humanity, Dunkin’ Donuts, Cox Communications and NPR. His agency was responsible for creating messaging, developing marketing strategy, and shaping the public perception for executives and companies in all industries. Sam’s agency was the #1-ranked boutique PR firm in Arizona for three years.
Sam has an MBA and BA in journalism from Arizona State University and has completed executive education at UC Berkeley and Stanford. He was a 2021 Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust Fellow and was honored as a “40 Under 40” by the Business Journal. He has also served as chairperson and board member for education, social services and healthcare nonprofits. But, most of all, Sam is a proud husband and father to two beautiful daughters (who challenge him every day of his life).
Vanessa Ruiz
President
Vanessa is a bilingual executive with a distinguished career in journalism, community advocacy, and higher education.
As Deputy Vice President of Educational Outreach and Student Services at Arizona State University, she led a team of over 100 professionals dedicated to increasing educational attainment and economic opportunity for diverse communities across Arizona. Her team’s efforts reached more than 100,000 students annually through partnerships with K-12 schools, foundations, nonprofits, businesses, and community stakeholders. Previously, she was Director for Diversity Initiatives and Community Engagement at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications where she developed recruitment and retention strategies for diverse and first-generation students, as well as faculty and staff, helping the school strengthen its commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Prior to joining the Cronkite School in 2017, Vanessa was an international journalist for 17 years. She was the main evening news anchor at the NBC affiliate in Phoenix, an associate producer and the youngest news anchor for Telemundo in Miami, and a reporter in Los Angeles. Over the years, she delivered stories to the homes of millions of U.S. and Latin American viewers in English and Spanish. Her interviews have ranged from conversations with the presidents of Peru, Ecuador and El Salvador, to covering the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the BP oil spill, Super Bowl XLI, Pope Francis’ historic visit to the United States, as well as on-the-ground reporting for the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
A three-time Emmy winner, Vanessa was named a “40 Under 40” honoree by the Business Journal and received the 2024 Tribute to Leadership Award from the YWCA of Metropolitan Phoenix. She is a Flinn-Brown Fellow and serves on the boards of the Phoenix Art Museum and Celebración Artística de las Américas. Vanessa holds a B.S. in Communications from Florida International University and a Master in Liberal Studies, with distinction, from Arizona State University.
Lori Dennehy, JD
Senior Grants Consultant
Lori’s dynamic career has spanned a variety of industries, sectors, and roles, leading to her current specialization in grants and related services for nonprofits. An altruist, idealist, and activist at heart, she is guided by a desire to help others and to make the world a better place.
Lori has over a decade of experience with nonprofits of all missions and sizes, from healthcare to human services, youth development, behavioral health, K-12 and higher education, museums and the arts, homelessness and housing, transportation, workforce development, pediatric hospice and cancer care, animal welfare, and more. During her five years with Boys & Girls Clubs, Lori and her team built and managed the largest daily out-of-school-time program in Arizona, achieving national recognition for program excellence. Before BearFruit, she drove new grant-seeking efforts for addiction treatment and social determinants of health at HonorHealth Foundation, facilitating collaboration among hospital leadership, clinicians, community partners, and stakeholders throughout the healthcare system, to better meet the urgent needs of our communities.
Prior to her nonprofit work, Lori earned her BA in Sociology at Arizona State University, followed by her JD at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. She gained experience in personal injury litigation, indigent criminal defense, municipal prosecution, construction defect, and insurance defense before making an early career pivot to lead the merger of Arizona’s historic Anytown Leadership Program with the local YMCA. A long-time volunteer for the program, she credits Anytown with shaping her philosophies of leadership, human relations, community building, and justice.
Lori is a lifelong learner, problem solver, systems thinker, free spirit, and dreamer. She enjoys gardening, DIYing, football, mindfulness, minimalism, and exploring nature with her two dogs, Eko and Emma.
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