The reason many may have not heard about the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga is because they do so many things, it’s hard to sum up their activities. They are unlike any public charity in town, says president Peter Cooper.
The Community Found-ation is an umbrella organization with more than 300 different funds and 50 scholarship funds that are currently sending more than 300 kids to college. They have a May endowment fund which is about 1/3 of their assets, a number of other endowment funds, and a lot of project funds. These include “little things” like the 21st Century Waterfront trust, a $120 million project, for which half of the funds came through the Community Foundation, Cooper says.
In these project funds, the foundation is the fiscal agent for private donations such as the ones that were made for the Signal Mountain Middle/High School and the East Hamilton Middle/High School. The foundation buys wrestling mats, computers, chemistry equipment and other items that local schools request. They handle many of the funds for public art, and all those tree plantings downtown. Funds for the rebuilding of the old Chattanooga Middle School into the Normal Park Upper School came through the foundation.
As if that wasn’t enough, the foundation also helps non-profits or those looking to become non-profits in providing them an umbrella under which to incubate their ideas. For short-term projects, this means they do not have to set up a new non-profit, but can rather work under the Community Foundation. The foundation consults with non-profits, especially those in crisis, and leads a number of community efforts like the upcoming Chattanooga Promise campaign and the planning committee the Chamber of Commerce is doing for long-term strategic planning for the city. Also part of the Community Foundation’s work is talking to donors about how they can structure their gifts to charities.
“The reason people don’t understand what we do is, because we do so many different things, you are not really sure what we do,” Cooper says. “We must do a lot of it, though, because we had about 3,000 donors last year, and had about $13.5 million in gifts. Somebody knows about us.”
The Community Founda-tion started in 1963, but sat idle until 1990 when their first employee, Cooper, was hired. From there it has grown from having no office or telephone to having year-end assets of $83 million last year.
Of the over 50 scholarship programs that the foundation has, the largest is the “Together We Can” fund they designed in 1991. It is primarily a need based scholarship fund helping more than 100 kids. The city of Chattanooga donates $160,000 a year to that fund and the foundation makes up the rest of it.
There are also the Mary Adams and Ellen Cash scholarship programs of the foundation, and they handle the Coca-Cola Company, Ronald McDonald House, Associated General Contractors and various sorority scholarship programs.
“It’s a real hodge-podge, but we have over 300 kids in college and very good graduation rates because of how we administer the programs and give support,” Cooper says.
The best advertising for these scholarships is word of mouth, as they have far more applicants than they can fund and can always use scholarship dollars, he says.
“That is one of those core social problems that I don’t think will ever leave us. We are always going to have poor kids who want to go to school, and I think a community that believes in its community enough to send all its children to school would be a remarkable,” Cooper says.
Of the direct fundraising that the Community Foundation does, Cooper solicits a lot of people, and there are endowment dollars that have earnings every year. The more prevalent mode of fundraising is done by those who come to the foundation with a project they want to raise funds for, which the foundation advises them and helps them along the way with. The foundation becomes the accounting function, and this indirect fundraising is how the majority of the 3,000 donors to the foundation are accumulated each year.
Cooper says that, like consumer confidence, he believes in something he calls “donor confidence.”
“After you watch your portfolio go from $10 million to $800,000, you are not feeling rich, and I think that impacts a donor’s willingness to make charitable gifts. Especially to make long-term charitable pledges,” he says.
Yet Cooper says one of the rules around the organization is that the donor is always right.
“If a donor feels like he can’t afford to make a gift, he is probably right and there’s not really any way I can convince them to do something they don’t want to do,” Cooper says. “What you do is that you constantly talk about the benefits of what you are doing so that when the pendulum swings back the other way, the donors know there is a good place to invest some money.”
The foundation’s donations in 2010 were a little over 19 percent from 2009, which Cooper says is a good sign that things are heading back in the right direction.
Cooper says: “It’s not that these people aren’t generous, because even in the depths of the recession, I don’t know of a single person in Chattanooga who didn’t meet a pledge. This is a very generous community and [the donors] are quality folks who understand that you have to invest something in your community.
“The results of their investments are all around you in the waterfront, Hunter Museum, Aquarium, Creative Discovery Museum, zoo and half the buildings at UTC. It’s the symphony, all the ballets and a lot of your reading programs.”
Cooper says the fact that these donors decided to stay in Chattanooga when they could live anywhere else shows that they truly have the city’s best interests at heart. Even though some locals may have never heard of the Community Foundation, our town is certainly glad that many have.