Community Foundation of Utah

Here are some examples of the wonderful workof CFs across the country for February, 2010

Aging

• The Chicago Community Trust has awarded $500,000 to AgeOptions, the Area Agency on Aging of suburban Cook County, through its Unity Challenge 2009 grant program, AgeOptions and eighteen community-based agencies will use the funds to help financially stressed older adults to stay in their own homes..

Scholarships

• Maine Community Foundation has announced that the Downeast Scholarship Fund, a collaboration with the Boston Foundation, will begin awarding scholarships to students in Washington County this spring. Through an anonymous donor, the Boston Foundation is making a ten-year commitment to support students seeking to further their education beyond high school. MaineCF will administer the program, which will meet a major portion of the students' financial need.

Green initiatives

• The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan has announced a grant of nearly $150,000 to Greening of Detroit for a pilot project designed to help maintain Detroit's greenways.
• The Columbus Foundation has announced sixteen grants totaling $25,259 from the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Gardens Fund, which the company established to support a wide range of "brown to green" projects in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

Haiti

• The Columbia-based Central Carolina Community Foundation has announced a $20,000 grant to the American Red Cross of Central South Carolina to assist with humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti..

Education

• The Greater Cincinnati Foundation has announced that it is accepting applications for its learning links grant program, which provides funding for creative and interesting projects or events that educators would like to present to their classrooms.
• The Community Foundation - Boulder County has announced it will hold two events promoting early childhood education in March. As part of the foundation's Ready.Set.Learn program, Bill Millett, a nationally recognized expert on early childhood education with a background in both business and the public sector, will  discuss how investing in early childhood education will build long-term economic vitality in the region.

Operating / capacity support grants

• The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta has announced 800,000 in general operating support to 13 nonprofits through its Common Good Funds program. In addition, four organizations will receive custom-designed packages of professional resources to help respond to a key organizational challenge or opportunity in one of the foundation's four focus areas — strategic planning and business analysis; board development; fund development planning; and advocacy.
• The New York Community Trust has announced that it is supporting a phone-in hotline for nonprofit executives who need help with immediate management challenges, coaching, information, strategic advice, or tips on challenging human resources issues.

Arts

• The Chicago Sinfonietta has announced a $75,000 grant from the Chicago Community Trust to enhance the symphony's Project Inclusion program, which is a mentoring program for artists of color designed to cultivate the next generation of musical talent by providing young musicians with professional development opportunities, coaching with senior members of the Sinfonietta, and job placement assistance. The grant will support the Project Inclusion Orchestra Fellows and the Project Inclusion Ensemble Fellows, the two different musician categories that make up the program as a whole.

Field of Interest / specific funds

• The Montgomery-based Community Foundation of Orange and Sullivan has established the Lake Foundation, which will provide support to organizations that serve battered women, abused children, and disabled veterans..

Reading

• The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta has announced that its CEO, Alicia Philipp, will participate in the first annual For the Love of Reading competition, a friendly "reading battle" featuring CEOs and presidents of Georgia businesses and universities. To participate, first watch the videos of the contestants on the Ferst Foundation Web site and then cast a vote for your favorite; you can cast as many votes as you like in return for a $3 contribution, which will be used to support the delivery of books to children in the state. The president or CEO with the most votes will be declared Georgia's Favorite Reader and be presented the "For the Love of Reading Award" on March 1, 2010.

Housing

• The Preservation Compact, a public-private partnership working to preserve and improve the supply of affordable rental housing in Cook County, has announced that in just eighteen months its Energy Savers program retrofitted thirty-five hundred apartments and other rental units in Chicago and neighboring communities. Funded in part by the Chicago Community Trust, the program will be expanded region-wide to take energy efficiency services and financing to scale for both single and multi-family housing as well as non-residential buildings.

Basic needs

• The Peter Kiewit Foundation has awarded $20,000 to the Mid-Nebraska Community Foundation to help local organizations meet essential human needs over the winter months.. Recipients include the Community Action Partnership of Mid-Nebraska, Grace Ministries' food pantry, the Rape and Domestic Abuse Program, St. Pat's/Holy Spirit food pantry, and the Salvation Army-North Platte corps.
• The Greater Houston Community Foundation is one of twenty-one groups participating in the Ozarks Million Dollar Hunger Challenge, the Houston Herald reports. Made possible by a $100,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation and a partnership with Ozarks Food Harvest, the challenge will enable the foundation to raise at least $3,600, to be matched 1:1 to fight hunger in the Houston and Harris County areas.

The Utah Nonprofits Day on the Hill was last week, and 30 or so nonprofits hit the marble, needs and solutions in hand. This new study from LA proves once again that advocacy is where it is at. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy found that between 2004 and 2008 the community benefits provided by LA County nonprofits engaged in advocacy and organizing included $2.6 billion in higher wages.... and that is just a start. Read the full results here - preferably while you are on a bus up to the capital!

And a special shout out to the intrepid new lobbyists from the environmental sector I watched steer Representative Noel away from global warming and on to huntin' and fishin'. Now that is advocacy!

Todd Manwaring from BYU, Steve Grizzel of Innoventures and Alex Lawrence at Funding Universe are planning a foru on the state of social entrepreneurship in Utah.  Here is an example of the type of program the Community Foundation would love to see grow in Utah -  The Bread Project, which trains low-income students, many struggling with the impacts of homelessness, criminal backgrounds, addiction and poverty to be successful bakers.

Read the story here.

Passing along this news from the bummer blogosphere:

The Boomer Project recently compiled some studies on the attitudes and outlook of the Boomer generation . These are the people we have been lead to believe will fill foundation and nonprofit coffers. I guess people forgot that these were also the people who have lost their retirement in the Great Recession.

Well someone asked and it turns out - they are NOT HAPPY. What I love about the study is it used real adjectives like bummed, sickly, overcast, gloomy. In a nutshell, they are all of the above.

The advice? "Noting their preoccupation with immediate stresses, the Boomer Project advises: Boomers will respond to pragmatic marketing messages, not overly optimistic ones."

Here is a nice convergence of a certain executive director's interests- our partner Skullcandy featured in Vogue, with help from our pal Henry Eshelman at Platform Media Group. !

Just read an interesting piece in a small newspaper in North Carolina. The Blue Ridge Times explored the impact of federal stimulus on local npos - and the hangover that is likely to result.

The  Western Carolina Community Action, in just oen example,  received about $3 million, for Head Start, health care, building greener communities through updating low income people's homes and updating their medical data software and - perhaps most important;y - not l;ayign off the teachers that work directly with the community's low income children

But now what?

North Carolina - just like Utah - has seen a serious downturn in its economy and reduced state revenues. Their legislature, just like ours, is slashing the very programs that the stimulus funds were meant to save.  There are no real plans to replace these sources of revenue in the future... Will we see three year olds pulled from classrooms? Will individuals step up? Will the investments made in communities be withdrawn? Stay tuned here -- or just read the Tribune.

This final dashboard of 2009 reports on year end giving, changes in revenue and the planning assumptions of Utah's nonprofits as they continue to meet the cultural, social and educational needs of our communities in 'the great recession'.

We are all familiar with the traditional year-end giving campaigns that nonprofits of all sizes and missions conduct after Thanksgiving. These donations can be crucial to an organization's annual budget. National philanthropy pundits predicted that Americans would continue reach deep into their pockets at the end of 2009 knowing the hardships faced by their neighbors. They forecasted more frequent, yet smaller, gifts and a possible increase in new donors, particularly those agencies serving low income individuals.

Our study found this prediction to hold true in Utah where the dollar amount of individual gifts decreased more significantly than either the total amount of dollars donated or the number of people giving.

• 28% of the 133 agencies reporting said the total amount of giving at year end was significantly lower in 2009 than 2008; and
  nearly as many - 21% - said it was significantly higher.

Utah does not, however, compare favorably to the rest of the United States. A Chronicle of Philanthropy poll conducted in early January found that 48% of 181 agencies saw an increase in holiday season giving in 2009 compared to 200 – more than twice that of Utah.

Down load the full report here. DashboardJan_2010.pdf

A friend passed this on and it is too good not to share:

DEAR FOUNDATION PEOPLE:

We’ve been “friends” for a long time. We call. You return our call a few weeks later. We hang on to your every word. You seem to like us too, because you send us checks, though they’re always smaller than we’d hoped. We send thank-you notes, or give you a piece of Lucite at our next dinner.

But the truth is, we don’t really talk. We in the not-for-profit world depend on you, your foundations, and your beautifully typed checks with a tycoon’s name on them; by one recent count, you have $628 billion that you could dole out to us. Still, let’s be honest: Our relationship is fraught. Most of us don’t tell you how we truly feel about you. We don’t say when we think you’ve made a bad decision, because in the hoity-toity world of big money (yours) and little not-for-profits (us), that would be impolite — and, on my part, stupid. We fear losing your money.

If we’re really in this do-gooder business to do good, though — and if we’re ever truly going to be partners — then we’re going to need a little more honesty. So here are some things we wish you’d stop doing — along with one pledge I’ll make — which would vastly improve our relationship.

1. Stop thinking you know everything. Don’t assume that your PhD diploma — which I see on the wall every time I visit — means that you understand the challenges of executing and implementing some of the good plans you fund. You’ve got lots of ideas, and you may write smart white papers about combating youth depression and suicide. But you probably still don’t know as much about it as the folks at To Write Love on Her Arms or the Trevor Project, who work with suffering people every day.

2. Stop mistaking marketing for overhead — and stop hating on overhead. We’re all running businesses, and we’ve all got more expenses than we want. But your constant refrain about us spending too much on communications staff, graphic design, and public relations is misguided. “Scaling up” means that people need to know about us. It also means that we’ll have to spend money on expenses that you label with the most unfairly pejorative word in our business: overhead.

3. Stop funding redundancy. There is a ridiculous amount of repetition in our sector — much of it encouraged by the way we ask for funding, but also spurred by the way you fund. Does it make sense to bankroll three different organizations claiming to be the umbrella coalition for New York not-for-profits — or could we just get behind one? Be less like Santa Claus, who visits the home of every good boy and girl, and more like Warren Buffett, who picks targets that make long-term sense and pulls in smart investors with him.

4. Stop thinking that newer is better. We all love shiny new toys. Over and over, you tell us, “Bring us something new.” We just wish you’d get behind programs with proven track records so that we could focus on making them better, rather than coming up with a new gimmick to catch your eye. We know that much of what we do isn’t sexy, but it is important; think about funding the not-for-profit Ugly Bettys too.

On my end, I promise to stop calling “for advice” or “just to check in” when that’s never the point of the conversation. We both know what I really want: your check.

Fondly, Nancy

A new study from the University of Chicago mirrors some of the findings from our entrepreneur focus groups. While people think non profits are warm and fuzzy - they do not trust them with their purchases!

"Across three experiments, we found that consumers hold stereotypes, or shorthand, blanket impressions about non-profit and for-profit organizations and that these stereotypes predict crucial marketplace behaviors, such as the likelihood of visiting of a website and willingness to buy a product from the organization," write authors Jennifer Aaker (Stanford University), Kathleen D. Vohs (University of Minnesota), and Cassie Mogilner (University of Pennsylvania).

Here si the study in a nutshell: - we need to make sure our messages exude competence as well as  commitment!

The authors found that people generally view for-profit companies are being competent, but also as being devoid of warmth, which does not lead people to admire them.

In contrast, they found that consumers perceive non-profits as being warmer than for-profits, but they also believe they are less competent than for-profits. Therefore, if consumer stereotypes are not interrupted, people are more likely to buy products from for-profits than non-profits."

Here is the link.

Thanks to our whiz web master and supporter  Troy Mumm at Third Sun Productions we now have a feed for all our updates! Simply click on the orange box  under 'connecti with us'  and you'll receive the latest innovation in philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit management and community foundation work!