The best gift you can give
By Sue Hafkemeyer / President and CEO
November is a special month at the Quad Cities Community Foundation. First and foremost, it’s our birthday month. On November 16, help us celebrate as we enter our 58th year!
It’s also the time of year, during Community Foundation Week, which runs November 12–18, that we celebrate our peers here at home and across the country. Looked at one way, each of the more than 900 community foundations in the United States offers a familiar set of services, resources, and expertise. But at the same time, each one is as unique as the community that it calls home. That’s because you put the “community” in “community foundation.”
What more timely example of what we can do together than our endowment-building challenge this past month? We challenged our community to give $75,000 to endowment funds at the Community Foundation and pledged to match each contribution dollar for dollar. Just over one week later, every match dollar had been claimed, with gifts going to 49 endowment funds for a combined $150,000 impact!
From the Transitions Mental Health Services Endowment to the Fulton Gardens Fund to the Quad Cities Mexican American Organization Scholarship, those 49 funds represent a beautifully broad range of our community’s interests, passions, and values. And each gift—given to endowment, where it will grow as a vital charitable resource forever—represents a sincere vision for the future of our region and the ways it can do even better by the next generations. We are the place where those things—your collective interests, passions, values, and vision—come together under one roof, all through the common thread of generosity. That’s the power of your Community Foundation. You can see all the funds that received gifts here.
We can achieve more together than we can alone. That belief lies at the heart of our match challenge, just as it grounds our Quad Cities Community Impact Fund. The Community Impact Fund, which provided those match funds and also fuels our annual grantmaking, is the product of the generosity of donors and their trust in the Community Foundation to understand the most pressing needs and most promising opportunities in our region. Together, we can take on goals that are too big and ambitious for any one person or organization to pursue on their own.
And that’s why, as we embark on our 58th year, it’s so important to us that everyone in our community knows they have a place at the Community Foundation. To be a resource that serves our entire community today and tomorrow, we need everybody’s perspective, everybody’s support. We need generosity in all its forms, not just financial. Apply for a scholarship to further your education. Volunteer on one of our many committees. Or stop by the office for a chat to help us understand what you see happening in the Quad Cities.
This November, consider the impact you want to make on your community and how we can work together to make it happen. That’s the best birthday gift we could ask for.