(bright intriguing orchestral) (bright intriguing orchestral upbeat music) - Since 1985, the Community Foundation of Central Illinois has granted more than $145 million in grants to nonprofit organizations.

Tonight, we wanna talk about the CFCI's 40th anniversary and learn more about what they do to shape local nonprofits, families, and neighborhoods across our region.

Mark Roberts is the President and CEO of the Community Foundation of Central Illinois.

Congrats on the anniversary.

- Thank you.

- I wanna talk a little bit about just nuts and bolts, what your organization does.

- Sure.

- Because I know people have seen the fruits of what you do, but may not understand exactly what the Community Foundation is.

So tell us a little bit about it.

- Well, the way I tend to describe the Community Foundation, in a way that tends to resonate, is we are a charitable savings account for our community.

What that means is that we work with members of the community, be they individuals, couples, families, corporations, and others who donate money to the Community Foundation to establish permanently endowed funds.

So the idea is, is those funds are gonna be here 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, making a difference in helping to improve the quality of life.

Our job at the Foundation is obviously to take good care of those funds, to invest them, to grow them as large as we possibly can.

And then every year, we make grants from those to do all kinds of great things in the community to impact the arts, social services, scholarships for local students, and a whole lot of other things as well, so... - So how do you differ from the United Way?

- Well, I don't think it's a perfect analogy, but if I describe us as a savings account for our community, you can think of the United Way in a simple manner as perhaps a charitable checking account for the community.

We all know that they have campaigns in a given year, they raise a lot of money, and I think in that subsequent year, they grant that back out to our community.

And so, the point of all that, though, is to have a strong United Way, as we do, and a strong Community Foundation, as we do, is a significant benefit for any community.

And so, the other significant difference is the United Way focuses very much just on social services in what they do, and they do a wonderful job of that.

The Community Foundation has the ability to focus on that, plus, all the other things that I just described as well.

We are very flexible in regards to the ways that we can support this community.

- Sure.

So we now have Community Foundations all over the country, and a few here in Central Illinois being around 40 years.

Can you tell us when... And you've been here, what, 17 years- - 17 years, yeah.

- With the organization?

When it started, were there a lot of community foundations, or was the Peoria area kind of jumping on the bandwagon at that time?

- Well, there weren't nearly as many as today.

But what communities have found is that in a era of decreasing corporate philanthropy, in a area of decreasing governmental philanthropy, and a host of other things, having these permanent sources of charitable capital to deploy in your community is a really big deal.

So now, today, quickly, one of the quickest growing nonprofit segments out there are community foundations.

There's over 900 of them in the United States today, and there's over about 55 or so in the State of Illinois, of which about 25 or 26 of them are staffed and operating, you know, in a significant way.

And so, it's a really, really important vehicle for our community to have this.

- So, as far as the people that come to the Community Foundation, or you seek out, is it corporations, is it individuals, or is it just a mix of the two?

- It's a mix of all that.

Most often, I would say, though, it is families or individuals, couples, who are at a point in their life where they are doing some charitable planning, doing some estate planning, and they know they wanna make a difference, they know they want to leave a legacy.

This community has been important to them.

Perhaps they worked at Caterpillar for 30 years and retired, they started a business, they raised a family, and they know that the quality of life that they've experienced in the Greater Peoria and the Central Illinois area is something they want others in the future to be able to take advantage of.

And so, they come to us, and we have the honor of working with them to say, "What is it that you want to do to positively impact the quality of life in this community, not only today, but 25 years from now, 50 years from now, and we can help connect you to those causes that matter in perpetuity?

", that's a blessing to get to do that work.

- And we have a lot of great causes, and luckily, a very charitable community- - Very much so.

- Around Peoria.

- Yeah.

- When these folks come to you, is it something like, you know, they wanna do everything you said, but they don't wanna do necessarily the day-to-day overseeing of how all this works, they entrust that to you?

- Yeah.

In many instances, people that are considering starting perhaps a private foundation see the Community Foundation as a great alternative to not having to go to the expense, the administrative effort, and all the other things that that entails.

And so, we're able to do almost all the things they're wanting to do charitably through the Community Foundation.

You know, as we sit here today, we administer nearly 450 different charitable funds under the umbrella of the Community Foundation, and they do all the things I've been talking about, they benefit the arts, they benefit mental health and social services, they benefit food insecurity, there are scholarships for our local students, and on and on and on.

We are an incredibly flexible charitable tool for this community.

- Before we talk about some of the specifics, let's go back in time again.

You mentioned Caterpillar earlier, and I know Caterpillar had a big presence, especially early on when all this started back 40 years ago.

- Yeah, it's one of my favorite stories to tell, it's sort of the origin story of the Community Foundation.

A gentleman named Ed Siebert, Ed at the time was the Vice President of the Caterpillar Foundation, and Caterpillar asked him to do an analysis to form a committee in the community to determine was a community foundation the right kind of vehicle for this community to have?

And so, he assembled a long list of the people with sort of the leading folks in the community at that time to help him with that.

And, ultimately, after lots of discussion, planning, visiting other community foundations, they determined that, "Yeah, this is something that we should do."

And so, the organization was formally established in late 1985, a couple of years went by, and we hired our first Executive Director, her name was Donna Hare, this lady was a force of nature, right?

She took over an organization that had exactly $2,540.39 to it, to its name at that time.

So we were hardly a going concern at that time, but through lots of hard work by her, by really great volunteers, by members of the community that started to come alongside and establish these permanent funds at the foundation, we started to grow.

Another year later, the Caterpillar Foundation made a half a million dollar grant to the foundation to establish the Caterpillar Leadership Fund, the fund that exists 40 years later, and is doing great things at the Community Foundation.

And from then, we started to be able to make grants and make a bigger impact in this community.

And so, from almost nothing to, as we sit here today, north of $85 million in assets, we granted about $7.7 million back into the community last year, and we've granted, as you noted earlier, over 145 million to the community since our inception.

So the impact is significant.

- Let's talk a little bit about how this all works.

You know, somebody, let's say, you know, I love pet shelters, so let's say a TAPS or a different organization comes and says, "We'd like to get some of that money."

How does the application process work?

- Yeah, we actually even have an entire grant program just for animal welfare, interestingly enough.

But, in general, we have multiple grant programs throughout the year, we communicate those very clearly to the community, especially to our nonprofit partners.

Then, there's a window of generally about two months where they submit grant applications, grant proposals to the Community Foundation, we then seat a committee of community members.

And that's really, I think the key to this whole thing, is it's not Mark Roberts and staff making decisions about these grants, it's members of the community making really good decisions about these assets that have been entrusted to the community.

And so, they review every single grant proposal, they rank them, they score them, and then they meet as a group to determine which ones that we are able to fund based on the amount of funds we have available at that time for that.

It's a terrific model that I think really resonates in the community.

And then we get the fun job, the best part of that entire job, is the part where we get to actually hand out the grants and the grant checks, which we're literally right in the middle of doing right now as a result of our fall grantmaking that we just completed.

So it's great work.

So when the process opens up for applications ahead of time, do you say, "Okay, we're gonna give out X amount of money right now"?

- Yeah, we've identified at the beginning of every fiscal year, not to get wonky about that, but we do a series of calculations on all of the funds that we have, we typically grant about 5% of the value of that fund at a given time, and we allocate that, and that's the amount that we're gonna be able to grant.

Now the reality is, I say, I told you earlier, we just granted $7.7 million in the community, that's great, it's an impact, but we only are able to fund about 50% of the proposals that we see every year anyway, right?

So the need exists and the ability for us to more significantly impact the community is really dependent on additional members of this community coming alongside to establish those funds, where we love having those conversations, and we're always ready to do that, so... - So you have more people wanting money than you have.

So tell us what makes a good grant application?

What are you looking for?

- Well, impact I think is the best word that we can use, right?

Is the proposal that we fund likely to make a significant impact on that particular problem?

Or, even if it's not a problem on the quality of life, it could be the beautification of a park or something like that, right?

So it's quality of life all the way around, but those that are gonna provide impact, that they are sustainable over time, increasingly, is there a partnership?

Does that organization, are they working with one or more other organizations?

The idea of funding an organization in isolation is increasingly, I think, sort of dated.

I think it's really important for this community that the more that we can see collaboration amongst our nonprofits, that's going to guarantee almost additional impact and greater capacity all the way around for those organizations as well, so... - And tell us again, what area, obviously, Peoria County- - Yeah.

- But what is your coverage area?

- We serve, what I like to call, a 50-ish mile radius around the city of Peoria.

And the "ish" is on purpose, because our friends over in Galesburg and Knox County actually have their own community foundation that is of pretty good size, and they're doing good stuff over there.

So we don't grant into Knox County.

We also don't grant into McLean County for the same reason.

But other than that, a periphery of all our parts of about 14 counties around the Greater Peoria area, we managed to do some amount of grant making into this.

- Tell us some of your, if you have personal favorite grants, and how, not only has it helped with an immediate need, but like you said, you want this to be a long-term thing.

- Yeah.

- What are some of your most memorable ones?

- You know, the things that I like the most, there's a couple of them.

One of them is our women's fund.

And I told you, well, we have roughly 450 different charitable funds at the foundation, but one of those funds is called the Women's Fund.

And it was established back in the 1990s to make grants to impact issues facing women and girls in our community and families.

And it has grown over time to a permanently endowed fund now that it has a balance of over $1.5 million by itself, right, and continues to grow.

But we have a robust number of donors to that fund, but also a lot of volunteers that help to run an Advisory Committee and Advisory Board of the Women's Fund.

And the way that they work together to promote the Women's Fund in relation, the Community Foundation of Central Illinois, and to make these really important grants to impact women, girls, families in our community, that's a big deal.

So one of my favorite things that we do is everything that the Women's Fund does as well.

- Mm-hmm.

- Yeah.

I think the other area is in regards to food insecurity.

About seven or eight years ago, we noticed that every year when we did the grants programs, we got essentially the same grant proposals from all of the same food-related organizations in the community, and all those proposals were for more food into the emergency food system.

And that's important, right?

We have members of our community then and now that are hungry, we have to find a way to continue to address that.

But we knew we wanted to take a little bit of a different approach at the Community Foundation.

So we stopped funding direct purchase of food, knowing that there are other resources in the community to do that, and we started making grants to collaborative projects to sort of work on the overall food system, the way the system is designed, to hopefully make it eventually so so much food doesn't need to be in the system.

That's a hard and decades-long amount of work that needs to be done by an entire community, but we've had good success in the very first grant we made from Ending Hunger Together was to an organization called the HEAL Partnership, and it's led out of the Tazwell County Health Department, they had lined up 19 different organizations and programs that were literally working together, planning together, measuring success together, and driving impact together.

That was a win.

And so, we've continued to do those grants to sort of help strengthen the system and the collaborative aspect of food insecurity up until today.

Now, we all have heard about what's going on in the government and a host of other things in regards to food insecurity, the need for food in the emergency system is critical right now.

And so, the foundation is very close to announcing some additional things we'll be doing in that regard.

- What about disaster relief?

Do you do anything with that?

- Well, unfortunately, the answer is yes, right?

In 2013, we all know what happened in late November.

And immediately after that happened, we established the Central Illinois Disaster Recovery Fund, and we accepted contributions from the community into that fund.

We also wrote a half million dollar grant to the Robert R. McCormick Foundation at that time, which was funded.

And that money came into the foundation as well.

That allowed us as the foundation and some of our partners to be positioned to respond to the mid and long-term recovery needs.

Because when a disaster happens, this country is really good at the initial response component, right?

We have the Red Crosses of the world, we have a host of other organizations that are ready to sort of parachute in and provide that support.

What we haven't thought through nearly as well in this country is the mid to long-term.

And so, we had that money as a pool of resources to start to deploy when, you know, those people started to leave town, those volunteers that came in, they left town.

And when some of the initial money started to wane, we were ready, along with a lot, dozens of other local partners, to help fund the fact that glass and nails and other materials had been blown into people's lawns in Washington, and their kids couldn't play out there anymore, right?

That kind of lawn mitigation was important.

Or they had shortcomings when it came to what their insurance would cover versus what their need was, and a host of other issues.

So I was really honored to be one of the founding members of the Long-Term Recovery Committee at that time, and we really organized to find effective ways to deploy that money, to help meet those shortcomings that a lot of people experienced, and we actually hired caseworkers to work with all of those folks, recovering on a literal, personal, case-by-case basis, and did a lot of good.

And the end result of that whole thing is not at all about the Community Foundation, it's everything about the community and the way that we came together to sort of organize how we're gonna respond.

It's left us a bit of a roadmap for the next time something happens, because something else will happen someday, you know, God forbid, but it will, and we need to be ready as a community on how we're gonna respond.

- A lot of organizations, when they talk about their history, they talk about pre-COVID and post-COVID.

If you will, tell us a little bit about how COVID affected your organization, and then what your organization did to help folks during that time period?

- Well, the impact on our organization at that time was similar to the impact on almost every organization, right, where we had to figure out new ways of working and new ways of communicating, and we did, and as did all the others.

But, really, the upside of all that is, again, we utilized the Central Illinois Disaster Recovery Fund to accept contributions, we had some good matching grants from Caterpillar Foundation and others, and through the ways that we grant money, we deployed that into the community to do all the things that were happening.

And, you know, if we think back about that unpleasant time, there were immediate food needs, and so, the grants that we had done through Ending Hunger Together to the HEAL Partnership, allowed them to very quickly, as 19 organizations working together, put food boxes and a host of other things together that they could get out to people in immediate need.

But then we also started to fund all the other challenges, even just basic capacity issues.

Fundraising wasn't as robust for some of those nonprofits, and we helped to fill some of those gaps and just a host of other things that were happening at that time.

And so, again, another example of a community organization, that is there to impact the community in positive ways, sort of being ready to do that when you need to.

But we can't do any of it without the help of the community members.

- With the community, I'm sure when this first started 40 years ago, that members of the foundation had to go out and solicit a lot of people.

These days, with being obviously more well-known over the last 40 years, do you still have to go out there and try and find people, or are people coming to you mostly?

- You know, it's a little bit of both of those things.

Certainly, we're more well-known today than we were then for sure.

But in some ways, I still call us, you know, that cliche of sort of the best kept secret in some ways.

Those that know about us, our nonprofit partners, our donors, our volunteers, know exactly what the foundation's about, they love our work, they're highly supportive.

But we still have a bunch of people in the community that sort of don't understand the value equation and exactly what we do.

They sort of conceptually know that we're doing good, right, but they don't know exactly how we do it.

And I think that's because we don't provide any direct services, you know, our job is to have as much money as we can to grant that to those nonprofits so they do the hard work, right?

So if we're supporting the children's home, you know, we're not doing any of that case management work that they do, they're doing that hard work.

Our job is "How do we deploy resources to help them?"

And so, yes, we're certainly more well-known than we were then, but we also rely on some really great estate planning attorneys and financial advisors and others, plus word of mouth from our existing fund holders who say, "You know, Mr.

and Mrs.

Smith, I know you're doing some estate planning, I know you're thinking about your legacy and your impact, go talk to the Community Foundation, because they might be able to help you in ways that are gonna let you do just exactly what you want to do, so you can feel really good about that."

- Sure.

- Yeah.

- Give us some more examples of people and organizations that you've helped throughout Central Illinois.

I know your different categories, we'll say animal welfare, like you've mentioned, arts, children and youth, community improvement, education, health, human services, workforce development- - Yeah.

- We've talked about food insecurity.

- Yeah.

- Give us a few more examples.

- Well, I know that the animal welfare component is close to your heart, right?

I've seen that over the years by the segments that you do.

But what we've learned over time, we literally, as I said, have a whole separate grants program just for animal welfare, people love their animals, is what we've learned.

And either while they're living or when they have passed, they've left money for the Community Foundation to establish funds to help with spaying and neutering, to help with homeless animals, to help with all the things that are important for those kind of things, Pets Meals on Wheels, that our friends down at neighborhood house run, and things like that.

And so, that's always a blessing, right, when we're able to do that and deploy those kind of resources.

So animal welfare is one, the arts is, I think, another important one.

I don't think we all are cognizant of how vibrant our local art scene is, and the impact that arts make locally in this community, to have working artists that can afford to live here, that can sell their work here and elsewhere, and add to the vibrancy of this community through their work is a really important thing.

So we do a whole segment of arts grants also each spring to support the murals that have been put up in our downtown, the arts performances that happen, and just a host of other things.

We have some other things on the radar screen that we would like to do in the art space, because I think that we know the arts could be utilized as more of an economic engine for this community.

As a matter of fact, we have one fund called the Arts Mean Business.

And the idea is to utilize that to drive economic development in a community through arts tourism or a host of other things as well.

So those are just a couple of areas, but, again, social services, on and on, and almost everything you can think of is something we're able to touch.

- Tell us about impact investing.

What is that?

- Yeah.

Impact investing is brand new to the Community Foundation, and it's a very rapidly growing segment in the Community Foundation sector.

What it literally means is, so we have 85-ish million dollars, as we sit here today, in the overall portfolio of the Community Foundation, we're gonna utilize, as opposed to our grant making, which is what I've been describing to you the whole time we've been talking, we're gonna utilize a portion of those assets to literally make investments into community projects.

Investments mean the connotation, meaning we're going to not make a grant, we're gonna make an investment, we're gonna be expecting a return of our principle contribution, and some at least modest amount of interest return.

Our intent is not to be in competition, it's not to be market rate lenders, like our banks are, as a matter of fact, our intent is to work more closely with our banks as partners in investing, but we're literally gonna move some of our money from Wall Street to Main Street, is how I like to describe it.

And so, it could be something as simple as a bridge loan to a local nonprofit that is awaiting a state or a federal grant that's delayed, it's interrupting their essential services, it could be as simple as a bridge loan, it could be something as complicated as one of the positions on affordable housing development or something like that.

You know, it's a tremendous need in our community at this point, affordable housing, there's a real shortage here, and so, potentially that.

But I am pleased to say that we're just about ready to announce the first investment that we're going to make.

We partnered with an organization that happens to be out of the St.

Louis area, but they have programming here in our community.

And what they do, we're investing in them as an intermediary, they'll then make grants to small businesses, very small businesses, that otherwise those individuals, those entrepreneurs might not qualify for traditional bank financing.

And so, they'll get those loans, and then that organization will surround them with a whole host of other supports, like credit monitoring and business services, business planning, on and on and on to help ensure their success.

So our investment is to help drive the creation of new small businesses, it's a job-creation and job-retention play.

And so, it's a very new way for the Community Foundation to be thinking, but it's also potentially incredibly impactful.

And I think it's gonna allow us to be perceived quite differently in this community as opposed to just being a grant making organization.

- Sure, so you plan on having a slow rollout on that, seeing how it goes, and maybe getting bigger?

- I think we're very interested right now, once we announce the first investment, I think we're anticipating that some folks are gonna start to come out of the woodwork and say, "Wait, you're doing this thing.

How can we all work together to do this thing?"

Which I think is wonderful for the Greater Central Illinois community.

- So as we wrap this up, let's talk about the future of the Community Foundation of Central Illinois.

Impact investing, of course, that's new- - Yeah.

- But anything else that you see on the horizon that's maybe new and exciting?

- Well, you know, I think, broadly, when I think about, you know, the impact we've made over 40 years has obviously been significant, but the brightest days of the Community Foundation are definitely ahead of us, because, obviously, the amount of the endowment that we have continues to grow.

You know, as we sit here today, we're among the sixth or seventh largest community foundations by asset size in the state of Illinois, and one of the two largest downstate south of the suburbs, right?

So we've been rapidly growing.

Why that's important, the larger we grow, the bigger impact we get to make through grant making and impact investing in this community, but we also have a long list of people who have included us in their estate planning, they've let us know about that.

And so, we know that at some point over the next five years, 25 years, whatever it is, we're gonna grow very rapidly as those people leave their legacy through the Community Foundation, allowing us to do just great things.

And so, it's a very positive time for the foundation, but it's also very encouraging, I think, for the future of our community.

- Exciting stuff.

I hope more people go to your website- - Sure.

- Find out more about your story, 'cause the 40 year story is very interesting.

Unfortunately, we don't have time to tell the whole thing here- - Sure.

- But it's on your website, and people should definitely check that out.

And, Mark, congratulations on the Community Foundation of Central Illinois 40th.

- Thank you.

- Here's to 40 more.

- Here's to 40 more.

- All right, thank you.

And thank you for joining us, we appreciate it.

You can watch this segment again at wtvp.org anytime, and check us out on Facebook and Instagram.

Have a good night.

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