Heather Stevens of Rise360 Consulting wants a greener Dallas

In a New Jersey high school in the early 2000s, a group of students raised funds to buy a portion of land in Brazil to preserve. Among them was Heather Stevens, who was already interested in protecting spaces and leaving them better than she found them.

Today, Stevens is a Lake Highlands resident, president and CEO of Rise360 Consulting and CEO of Scalanthropy.

“I started Rise360 Consulting 13 years ago, and I do large-scale capital strategies for revitalization projects around green space, human health, safety and art preservation,” Stevens says. “I’m currently working on two big (projects) right now.”

One of those projects is south of Fair Park, where Stevens is helping lead the capital strategy for a roughly $40 million community park. The project aims to transform land once occupied by homes and businesses taken through eminent domain in the late 1960s and early 1970s into a community asset serving about 13 neighborhoods.

Fair Park is 277 acres, more than 80% of which Stevens says is covered by impermeable surfaces, leaving little tree canopy and contributing to the area’s heat. A master plan for the park called for green space along its perimeter, including the area where the new community park will be built.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, 300 Black homes and businesses were bulldozed through eminent domain to make way for parking lots serving Fair Park, Stevens says. Residents were promised green space in return.

More than 50 years later, that promise has yet to be fulfilled.

“Back in 2022, Fair Park decided they were going to proceed forward in fulfilling that promise, and so I got pulled,” Stevens says. “I got hired to come and help them build out the strategy to raise the funding for it, and it has been a complex road for them. But just recently, we’re over 90% secured in funding, and construction will start at the end of this year.”

The park will include multiple children’s areas for different ages, a dog park, an expansive green lawn, a pavilion, a stage, a fitness loop and outdoor fitness equipment. The project will also include programming focused on health screenings, fairs and small businesses.

The fence along Fitzhugh Avenue will come down, Stevens says, giving residents direct access to the new green space. The project will also include 60 permanent parking spaces for the community.

The park is expected to break ground at the end of this year and be completed in mid-2028.

Her other major project is in the Southwest Medical District, where she is partnering with Texas Trees Foundation as its capital strategist.

The Southwest Medical District is the city’s second-largest employment center and, according to Stevens, its largest heat island. More than 80% of the district is covered by impermeable surfaces, while less than 5% has tree canopy.

“The medical district is supposed to be an area of healing,” Stevens says. “It is within the buildings, but immediately when you step outside, very poor air quality. It’s very hot, and it’s unsafe.”

The $250 million project is a collaboration between Texas Trees Foundation and the City of Dallas and is designed to improve human health and safety, environmental resilience and infrastructure throughout the district and surrounding neighborhoods.

The project will begin with the relandscaping of Harry Hines Boulevard, including the planting of 4,000 trees. Stevens says the project is expected to improve air quality and reduce temperatures by 15 to 20 degrees.

Later phases will transform a highway interchange into a cap park, with the roadway running underneath, and add a pedestrian bridge over Harry Hines Boulevard. The changes are intended to make it easier and safer for people to walk between the medical district’s institutions and surrounding neighborhoods.

The Harry Hines Boulevard portion is expected to break ground at the end of next year, with the park following in late 2028 or early 2029.

For both projects, Stevens’ role is less about managing the money and more about figuring out how to bring it together.

“I help build out the capital strategy,” she says. “So how the funds are going to be raised, how they’re going to be procured, and how they’re going to be brought together to make the project work.”

That means looking at state, federal and local funding, as well as private philanthropy, and finding a way to bring those sources together. It also means telling the story of each project and connecting it with the people and organizations who can help make it happen.

“These are just two examples, but I’ve worked on many projects and hope to work on other projects that are just as powerful and impactful to our city,” Stevens says.

Stevens’ approach to connecting purpose with funding also led her to create Scalanthropy, a platform designed to help nonprofits find donors whose giving aligns with their work.

The name, which Stevens coined several years ago, combines “scaling” and “philanthropy.”

The idea grew out of her work at Rise360 Consulting, where she created an algorithm and database to help identify potential donors for specific projects.

“Everything is very personal,” Stevens says. “It’s about what are their alignments in giving? What are they passionate about?”

Stevens noticed that many of the nonprofits coming her way were small organizations with annual budgets between $200,000 and $1 million. Existing donor-search software could be expensive, making it almost impossible for smaller organizations to access the same type of information.

So, she built her own resource.

Scalanthropy allows nonprofits to search for potential donors based on factors such as geographic location, causes and specific areas of interest. Steven says the database contains more than $1 trillion in donor data and can be searched down to individual ZIP codes.

The platform also works in another manner. Donors and individuals can search nonprofits and see information about their standing and giving history, creating transparency between the organizations seeking funding and the people providing it.

“It doesn’t do the fundraising for you,” Stevens says. “It still requires people to be thoughtful about how they fundraise, but it gives you the resources and the right donors that you can have and go and plan to (talk to).”

Stevens began building the database as a concept in 2017, but Scalanthropy officially launched in January of this year. The platform costs $25 a month with no contract, which she says was intentional.

Stevens’ work extends beyond the projects she is hired to build. She has also served as the president of the Executive Women of Dallas organization, continuing her involvement in efforts that connect people, philanthropy and the community.

Whether she is helping transform a piece of land, creating new green spaces across Dallas or helping a small nonprofit find the right donor, Steven says her work ultimately comes back to the same idea that first sparked her interest in preserving nature as a high school student.

“I like the idea of being able to leave things better than they were and improve them,” she says. “So whether it’s preserving or conserving something, or it’s building something where something doesn’t exist.”

For Stevens, that means finding ways to preserve what is worth protecting, and for her, Dallas is worth protecting.