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.
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
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