Roy L Hales/Cortes Corrents - Cortes Island’s little community foundation has turned to be a leader in terms of innovation.
“Most community foundations have years and years of fundraising and millions of dollars of endowment behind them. They get to have their cake and eat it too,” explained Executive Director Manda Aufochs Gillespie.
“This idea that we've got to just hit the ground running and figure out what the social profits on Cortes need and trying to help become a partner and getting that for them, turns out that's really innovative in the community foundation world. It's only the most up to date modern community foundations that are trying to figure that out.”
Mark Spevakow, Chair of the Cortes Island Community Foundation added: We wanted to be effective now. Everyone is aware of how many challenges are here right in front of us.
If we had to wait until we were able to build up a big pool of funds, it would have to be really in the millions of dollars to be effective. Say we are able to eventually hit a place where there's a couple million dollars in the bank, then we could expect through having those investments out there that we might be able to distribute $150,000 to the community. As a small community foundation and one that was just starting up, we don't know when we will hit those type of numbers.
It's really about discussing with people and trying to get them to understand that by leaving money down the road to the community foundation, perhaps in their will, then it gives us an opportunity to keep building on this work that we're doing.
We knew we couldn't wait, so we've tried to figure out a way to be effective right off the get go.
Part of that was by agreeing to get some funding in from people involved with the community foundation and a little bit from outside people and hire some staff to start to do all this work that we needed to do, we went from an organization that was waiting for its charitable status to come to really hitting the ground running.
Mark Spevakow: If we had to wait until we were able to build up a big pool of funds, it would have to be really in the millions of dollars to be effective. Say we are able to eventually hit a place where there's a couple million dollars in the bank, then we could expect through having those investments out there that we might be able to distribute $150,000 to the community. As a small community foundation and one that was just starting up, we don't know when we will hit those type of numbers.
It's really about discussing with people and trying to get them to understand that by leaving money down the road to the community foundation, perhaps in their will, then it gives us an opportunity to keep building on this work that we're doing.
We knew we couldn't wait, so we've tried to figure out a way to be effective right off the get go.
Part of that was by agreeing to get some funding in from people involved with the community foundation and a little bit from outside people and hire some staff to start to do all this work that we needed to do, we went from an organization that was waiting for its charitable status to come to really hitting the ground running.
Podcast image: Triumphant woman shouting out to the world - Photo by Joyful on Unsplash
