The Delaware Difference Makers began in January 2016 as a small nonprofit networking group for younger professionals (25-40) that would meet monthly in Wilmington. We would generally talk about different news and events related to the nonprofit sector and help build bridges between various development and executive directors across different nonprofit organizations and with those organizations and individuals that support the nonprofit sector in various ways.
Around the same time, the Delaware Division of the Libraries started a similar networking group that had meetings in Kent County in Dover. By 2018, we began coordinating these meetings with the Wilmington Group and cross promoting as best we could. We eventually we added meet ups in Newark and in Sussex County
A few months after the Delaware Difference Makers group started to meet, the members of the group decided that we needed a website to make it easier to cross promote each other’s events and share information. This led to the development of the Delaware Difference Makers website as well as offering a free centralized online calendar for everyone to post and share their nonprofit focused events (mainly to help avoid conflicts because nobody knew who was doing what). The DDM website also has been used to help promote board and other volunteer and job opportunities and links to other key locally focused volunteer and job posting websites since that time.