Transformation happens every day
By Randy Moore / Board Chairperson and Interim President & CEO
As I step in as interim president and CEO of the Quad Cities Community Foundation, I’m enjoying the privilege of working in new and closer ways with our talented team—and of seeing the transformational work we do from a fresh perspective.
We talk a lot about transformation at the Community Foundation. It can feel like such a big, bold word, especially in our sphere of major community issues like affordable housing, access to education, and social justice and equity. Of course, transformation can be dramatic—just look at the $566,000 we recently granted through our Coordinated Field of Interest Grant program. As one of our biggest single grantmaking cycles each year, the program is nothing short of transformational in the impact it has on our community.
But that’s not the whole story. During this time of change, I’m also learning to appreciate the smaller actions, decisions, and attitudes that add up to capital-T transformation.
Consider the transformative potential represented by that $566,000. It’s possible because of the 32 different nonprofits receiving funding for their missions to address a wide range of needs and opportunities in our region, from youth development and education to health, the arts, and raising people out of poverty. They’ll each use the funding they’re receiving in the ways they know will take their efforts to the next level, whether that’s by focusing on one successful program or for general operating support. Most importantly, these grants themselves are only possible because of the generosity of donors in our community—people who established the Field of Interest Funds that this year’s grants were drawn from and people who made gifts of all sizes to those funds.
What culminates in a single act of transformation, in other words, is the product of so many individual acts carried out every day. To me, they’re all worth celebrating. The common denominator is a set of core, guiding beliefs and intentions, whether that’s an organizational mission to improve quality of life in some way for those who call the Quad Cities home or a personal commitment to giving back to your community through generosity.
Living our mission every day is so important because we never know when it will make all the difference. That’s a lesson we all learned when COVID-19 came in and rewrote the rules of everyday life almost overnight. Our community’s deep, ongoing belief in the power of generosity is why we were able to activate the Disaster Recovery Fund, raising gifts from people like you and granting back out so many dollars to our region’s nonprofits, each of whom had its own mission to guide the best response to the pandemic with the help of that funding.
I’m learning that every day is filled with opportunity at the Community Foundation: you never know when a community member is going to step up and give, when an organization is going to come forward with a brilliant new initiative, or when a need or opportunity in our community is going to assert itself with unprecedented force. But our commitment to our mission and values keeps us poised to act and grow, to find opportunity around every corner.
That will be true, too, as we undertake the national search for our next president and CEO—a deliberate process taken one crucial step at a time until the right person is identified, marking the next exciting chapter in the Community Foundation’s 57-year history.