What is a Community Foundation?
Community Foundations are a new kind of charitable trust, locally managed, independent charities.
There are 56 local community foundations throughout the UK which cover 94% of the population; with the majority working within their county boundaries as endowment builders, grant-makers and community leaders.
There are two broad purposes to a community foundation:
- To work with the community supporting local voluntary and community activity through a programme of locally based, constructive grant making and capacity building.
- To work with local donors by pooling individual donations into a high interest endowment fund and to provide permanent and growing funding for activities that strengthen the community.
Donations come from a range of sources, but principally from philanthropic individuals and community-minded companies.
Alongside their work in developing endowment, Community Foundations administer flow through funding attached to local, regional and national initiatives.
Collectively the Community Foundations made more than £70 million in grants, benefitting over 18,000 community groups last year.
The history of community foundation concept
The concept was created by a philanthropic business man and attorney Frederick Harris Goff in 1914 (pictured left); who started the first community foundation in Cleveland, Ohio.
He wanted to develop a community-orientated foundation which would enable charitably-minded individuals to establish permanent funds that could be distributed as grants for the improvement of the local community.
His research showed that banks were good at taking the money but were not good at giving it back out to the community.
Therefore, his community foundation concept would keep its investment and distribution arms separate; with banks managing the funds and people, chosen for their positions of trust and honour in the community, having the responsibility for distributing money earned from those funds.
Cleveland Community Foundation is the oldest, but not the largest community foundation in the United States. To date it has $1.9billion in assets, and last year gave out $85million in grants.
This successful concept of Frederick Harris Goff has not been changed, but has been replicated all over the world. There are now over 600 Community Foundations worldwide.
Click here if you would like to know more about the Community Foundation Network in the UK