There is plenty to celebrate as the Community Foundation approaches the end of our 30th year.

• The 1,430 charitable funds individuals, families, businesses and organizations have established here distributed a record $19 million in grants during the fiscal year that ended June 30, including scholarships that, for the first time, exceeded $1 million.
• While more money was invested in the community in grants, assets still grew by 1% to a record $297 million.
• The total grants in grants awarded over those 30 years has reached $240 million.

We’re singing happy birthday to YOU, not to us.

Contributions to those charitable funds — $29 million last year alone — made what the Foundation does possible.

You can find more about our fiscal 2015-16 performance, as well as lists of grant recipients, charitable funds and investment performance at www.cffoxvalley.org/CommunityReport. Read our annual Report to the Community online, or ask us for a copy for yourself and some for your friends by calling 920-830-1290.

More important than the numbers, is what the grants are accomplishing. Here are just a very few examples:

• Fourteen charitable funds made grants totaling $201,000 to Catalpa Health, allowing it to increase its therapist count by 18 over two years ago, putting some to work addressing a teen population in the Fox Cities that reports considering suicide at twice the state average (12% vs. 6%).
• An Environmental Sustainability grant helped CAP Services reach dozens of at-risk students in the Waupaca area, keeping them engaged in learning by teaching them sustainable building practices at a job site (Waupaca’s Eco Park) instead of in a classroom.
• The Foundation and its community partners supported the 2016 Fox Cities LIFE Study, which provides statistical measures the community can use to decide what are our most pressing issues. A diverse group of community members did that, selecting poverty, youth health, youth safety and student performance as the key concerns.

The Community Foundation was created in 1986 with $5,000 Walter L. Rugland received as part of the first Community Service Award given by Aid Association for Lutherans (now Thrivent Financial), where he had been president, CEO and chairman. Thirty years later, his $5,000 has been joined by 1,450 charitable funds with total assets of $297 million, money that is being put to work improving our community now, and for future generations.

What better birthday gift could you want? Now, would you like ice cream with your cake?

Read full news release 11-15-2016
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