Additional Links
Community Problem Solvers. The Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region brings people together to think about the community’s vision for well-being and ways to help solve problems that lead to greater flourishing for all.
Educators. The Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region listens, learns and shares knowledge to raise awareness of community issues and effective ways to give.
Inclusive partners. The Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region encourages giving from all generations and engages partners from throughout the community to discover difference-making change.
Impact-makers. The Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region seeks to foster personally meaningful connections between donors and nonprofit organizations, resulting in a stronger community for all, today and for future generations.
We do this by connecting individual gifts to nonprofits through grants. Our knowledge about important issues facing the Fox Valley Region is based on strong relationships with nonprofits and our unwavering pursuit of understanding our community needs.
Individual gifts, when joined with others given through the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, ensure the impact lasts forever so that our community will always flourish.
We are a tax-exempt, publicly supported nonprofit organization managing charitable funds — mostly permanent endowments — created by many families, businesses and organizations.
These funds generate grants for the long-term benefit of the people of the Fox Valley region of Wisconsin.
We focus our work in Calumet, Outagamie, Shawano and Waupaca counties and the Neenah-Menasha area of Winnebago county, and partner with families of funds in Brillion, Chilton, Clintonville, Shawano and Waupaca.
Our donors have enabled us to become the second-largest certified Community Foundation in Wisconsin and among the top 10% of more than 750 community foundations nationwide.
The Council on Foundations certifies that we achieve national standards of excellence for U.S. community foundations.
We ensure that, together, we make a big difference. And we ensure that gifts last forever so that our community will always flourish!
The Community Foundation has been certified as a 2022 Silver-level Employee Friendly Workplace in the Fox Cities by the Fox Cities Chamber of Commerce. This certification recognizes employers who demonstrate a significant commitment to promoting work/life integration by creating a positive work environment and experience for all employees.
Silver certified employers demonstrate a significant commitment to offering and expanding benefits and policies that support the work/life needs of employees.
In 2021, the Community Foundation engaged in a strategic planning process. These results and recommendations are included in a Strategic Direction that will guide our work through 2025.
The foundation for our success includes focusing on our:
We build on our core business of providing charitable giving-tools and trusted services to donors, professional advisors, nonprofit organizations and other community partners. This is combined with a strong information technology platform and a supportive, accepting workplace culture so we can continue to flourish ad meet our strategic priorities.
There are four strategic priorities that build upon this strong foundation to drive important areas of focus that we believe will make communities in the Fox Valley region stronger:
Your Community Foundation was established in 1986 from a desire to give an enduring gift back to the community. When Walter L. Rugland received the first “Community Service Award” presented by Aid Association for Lutherans, he used the $5,000 prize money to pursue his dream of a “catalyst for change” working across the region.
Walter was the former president and CEO of the Appleton-based fraternal insurance company now known as Thrivent Financial. He had heard about community foundations from his son, Walt, who was working in Hartford, Conn. Walter knew giving back was part of the fabric of the Fox Valley region of Wisconsin.
“What you’re doing is having the Foundation preserve your money for use for the future,” he explained at the time. Persuasive enough on his own, Walter also enlisted the help of contractor O.C. Boldt, attorneys Arthur Remley and Roger Baird and industrialist Paul Groth to join him in making personal visits to community leaders to build support for the idea.
Walter explained the need by recalling working on farms as a boy in North Dakota and one day asking a farmer why he plowed a field under to lie fallow for a year. The farmer replied, “The land has been very good to us and, if we don’t give some of it back, it probably won’t keep helping us.” Walter added, “That’s how I look at the Community Foundation. We give things back to the area because it has been very good to us.”
Check out this vintage video from the late 80s, The Enduring Gift, in which co-founders Walter L. Rugland, Art Remley and Paul Groth, (all now deceased) explain their reasons for establishing the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region.
You can hear Walt Rugland Jr. talk about his father’s legacy in our new podcast, Voices from the Valley: A Podcast of the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region. Listen to this episode titled, “Our Story.”
The word Community in our name is central to our mission. It means all of us, together. All of us in the Fox Valley region continue to be needed to help create a vibrant Fox Valley region. Because, together, we flourish.
4455 W. Lawrence St.
Appleton, WI 54914
(920) 830-1290
Monday-Friday:
8:00am – 11:30am,
Noon – 4:00pm
Confirmed in compliance with national standards for U.S. community foundations.
