The community in the foundation - part two

Community foundations are exactly what they say they are: a way for communities to gather together their money and other resources in a central location and then send it back out into the community. Within that basic frame, there are a lot of ways to be a community foundation. Most of what varies from one foundation to another is this: who decides where the money goes.
 

About a month ago, we sat down with one of the first Board members from PFund, Tom Borrup. Tom told us about those early meetings when the Board was figuring out how it wanted to be a foundation. At the end, they wanted to use a community review process. This, they decided, gave PFund the most flexibility to grow by providing a model that could meet the changing needs of the LGBT community.

PFund still operates by a community review process. Imagine an hourglass with the foundation itself being that skinny part in the middle. The foundation is just the connection, the point which pulls together the inflow and the outflow. Our role is to provide the infrastructure, the space for all of it to come together.

Some may not realize that staff do not actually make the funding decisions at PFund, they simply facilitate the process.. A community panel representing the breadth of PFund’s community comes together for both the grant and scholarship review. The grants review committee goes through a combination of training and relationship-building designed to support them in assessing the proposals. This means making sure that all review committee members have shared understanding about the members of our community – the meaning  behind the L, the G, the B and the T, as well as an understanding of racial equity and budgets and nonprofit organizations, to name a few. Scholarships are only slightly different in that each scholarship is set up to meet specific needs. Reviewers are given directives, such as scholarships connected to specific communities or academic subjects or kinds of colleges – and then they meet together to match applicants with scholarships and define awards.

There is a lot of generosity laced through this story. There is the generosity of each individual who makes a gift to PFund and, in so doing, trusts their gifts to a community process. There are scholarship donors who name the specific area of their gift and then let the community process determine the right match, To donors who give to support our grantmaking, the beauty is that, you, our donors care about a specific aspect of PFund and yet also know that it’s a group of people you maybe have never met who will be deciding where those funds will have the greatest impact.

Many of you have volunteered for the community review process – either for grants or for scholarships – over the last 23 years. Some of you have volunteered two or three times, taking a break for five or ten years before coming back to serve again. It has been your brilliance and commitment that has guaranteed that as the grant and scholarship funds pass through PFund’s doors, it truly does so as part of a community process.

The metaphor for an hourglass isn’t really the best metaphor. To be completely accurate, we have to bend that hourglass into a circle. Because here’s part of what’s amazing: many of the students who have received scholarships and staff from organizations who have received grants also show up at PFund as part of the community review process. And many more than that are donors themselves. Our hourglass is more like a circle, or overlapping circles, of individuals and organizations who give, who direct where the giving goes, and who also receive.

This is a huge thank you to each and every one of you who is part of this process: every one of you who gives dollars in the broad arrays of ways that you give and every one of you who gives your time by sitting down to figure out where to direct our collective community resources.

This is the community in the foundation.

- Kate and Susan

The community in the foundation: a bit of history…or, why being a community foundation is important to PFund (part one)

The two of us were grantwriters long before we were grantmakers. We knew how to differentiate between general operations, capacity building and project-focused grant proposals. What we didn’t pay as much attention to was the various kinds of foundations. We knew them generally as “likely to fund us,” or “not meeting their guidelines.” It’s kind of how most grantwriters think about the funding world.

We weren’t completely naïve, we were aware of the basic differences between community and family and corporate foundations. But being aware of the basic differences didn’t mean that we really appreciated what a community foundation does. At least, not until we came to PFund.

While all foundations are vital avenues for sending dollars into communities, we are both particularly proud to work for a community foundation. A “community foundation” is just what it says it is: a foundation that takes seriously the voices, the vision and direction of the members of a community, raises money from that community, and then directs those resources back into community in way that is responsive to our current needs and issues. In other words, the foundation only provides the infrastructure for the work, the real excitement circulates throughout the members of the community.

There is a Midwest tradition to community giving that it’s worth taking a moment to be proud of.

The first community foundation was set up in 1914 in Cleveland, Ohio (which, by the way, is where Susan was born and raised so she wanted to include that factoid). It’s now the Cleveland Foundation, a model for urban-based community foundations across the country. Here’s another fascinating factoid: the majority of community foundations in the early part of their development were found in the Midwest. And still, in 2011, there is a greater percentage of community foundations here than in almost any other region except the Northeast.

So, 1914 and the first community foundation – the legacy that eventually led to the establishment of PFund. What was happening in 1914 in the Midwest that would enable the birth of this new form of giving?

Woodrow Wilson is President of the United States and this country is in the middle of what is called “The Progressive Era.”  In 1913, the 16^th Amendment is ratified and the first income tax is put into place – marking a decisive moment in our national debate about the role of government and taxation in redistributing resources and providing a social safety net. There’s another historical tidbit to add to this picture: the early 20^th century, the period we are talking about, is the first time that the United States had seen a sizable middle class.  And the Midwest, with its combination of industrial and agricultural resources, was the leader in this national economic change.

In the context of these national conversations about how best to provide for the common good and in this moment where more community members than ever before have enough to live comfortably with a little left over - that’s when the model of the community foundation was born.

There are a lot of responses that a community can have when it finds itself in the midst of abundance. One is to just stick the cash under the mattress, hoard the gold, make sure that my own savings account is full and let my neighbors worry about themselves. The other thing is to look at what is extra and then to dream about sharing it. To ask where that extra can be spent so that it does the most good.

This legacy of sharing for the common good is the legacy of the Upper Midwest. This is part of the legacy that PFund draws from. A funny thing about legacies: they inform you even when you are largely unaware of their details. The more we understand about the region we are part of, the more we understand where we come from, the more it makes sense that when PFund’s founders met together to consider how they would leave their legacy, they decided to create a community foundation. One can’t help but wonder if this propensity to sharing, to paying attention to the broader community, is in the water. Wherever it comes from, it’s a good legacy to continue passing along.

-Kate and Susan

PS – We’ve been talking a lot about this thing we call “community” in the office lately, and why the way that PFund connects to our community is so important. Stay tuned next week for an update on our community-driven scholarship process and how PFund is unusual even among other community foundations…

Speaking of the Upper Midwest

We’re all a bit bleary-eyed in the office today. Springing back from Daylight Savings Time is always hardest on that first Monday after the weekend. Our bodies, like yours, are much smarter than the clock. They know that 7am is a big lie and that 6am is the honest truth.

Daylight Savings Time is one of those things we have in common. And across our region, we share a particular relationship to this shifting of time: it means that spring is just ahead. And for the Upper Midwest in March, spring is something we long for, fierce in our eagerness and completely without shame.

Our region: the Upper Midwest. When PFund’s founders defined the foundation’s reach as “Minnesota and the Upper Midwest,” there was no clear definition of what that meant. When you hear “the Upper Midwest,” what do you think?

This is a vast landmass, including the once-prairie-now-farmland of Iowa, the pine and oak forests of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, the badlands of the Dakotas, and the western edge of the Great Lakes. You could define us as the headwaters of the Mississippi River watershed, but that extends much further than the upper five states. What exactly makes us a region? And why just these five states?

We’re going to be asking that question a lot over the next few years. Because if PFund is to be a foundation serving the Upper Midwest, we have to understand what the Upper Midwest means. The easiest thing we can do is make sure that we’re in community with the variety of LGBT communities and organizations found in this region. And we’ll certainly do that. But we would like to go deeper. Why does it matter to build our strength in this region? What other local issues impact our lives as LGBT people? And what does it mean to truly, truly “build communities in Minnesota and the Upper Midwest where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are celebrated and live free from discrimination, violence, invisibility and isolation”?

We’ll be asking versions of this question wherever we go. And as PFund continues to travel across the region, learning more about LGBT lives in a variety of communities, we’ll also be asking how a foundation can support those communities to define their own visions and strategies. After all, what needs to be done today in Waterloo, Iowa isn’t the same as what wants to happen in International Falls, MN or Minot, ND, let alone in the Twin Cities.

We’re ending many of these blog postings in the same way, but each is equally true: we are excited to learn with you.

-Kate and Susan

Going back to where we started: from Kate and Susan

The two of us have been drinking a lot of coffee and eating a lot of lunches during these first two months with PFund. There are so many of you we want to meet. We are eager to hear your stories about PFund and to listen to your vision for LGBT communities in the Upper Midwest. We anticipate a lot more cups of coffee before the first six months are through.

Some of the first coffee dates we set were with two of PFund’s founders. Why, we wanted to know, did they start this foundation? What were they hoping for?

Origin stories are powerful things. They are a kind of measuring stick, useful for understanding how far we have come but also useful for reflecting on how the broader context around us has changed. We remembered this as we sat with Jim Quinn and then Gregg White over coffee.

PFund, or Philanthrofund as it was then called, was started by four gay men, four friends, in 1987 as a response to the emerging AIDS crisis and its effect on the gay male community. As one of the founders explained, “Remember, in 1987 we assumed that everyone who was HIV positive was going to die. We didn’t understand any other possible future.” They saw the legacy that many of their friends had already established. They knew that many of their friends, rejected by their families of origin, had made the gay community their family and home. The founders’ concern was how to make sure that if these men were dying, their money would somehow go back into the community that had cared about them.

The four men approached one of the local foundations to see if they would be willing to house a fund where gay people could leave their bequests. They were told by this foundation that their money was welcome as long as the name of the new fund didn’t include anything related to homosexuality.

Instead, with the $2,000 they pooled together, the friends established Philanthrofund. Their vision: we are strong enough to take care of our own. This meant many different things: it meant that the foundation could be a place where community money could be collected in order to go back into the community. It also meant that the foundation could be a voice, a place of power that could then be used to influence other foundations and other organizations to be responsive to the needs of the gay community. They wanted this legacy to go towards improving the community for all of them, building its capacity to take care of its own.

As the two of us sat down with Jim and Gregg almost 25 years later, we noticed how things have changed and, at the same time, how they remain the same. What’s different: PFund now works with and for the broader LGBT communities, having shifted almost immediately into broadening beyond the gay community alone. There are more organizations, more businesses, and more general knowledge about LGBT people than there was when PFund began.

But some things haven’t changed at all. PFund continues to believe that every community and every organization has the right to determine its own vision and strategy for the changes it wants to make possible.  Our vision continues to be as a catalyst in building communities in Minnesota and the Upper Midwest where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are celebrated and live free from discrimination, violence, invisibility and isolation.

Origin stories are powerful things. They tell us how far we’ve come and how much the world around us has changed. As PFund enters a new period of strategic planning with a range of new staff, we are proud of the ways we continue to be guided by our own origin story.

-Kate and Susan