2014 Donors, Gifts, and Grants

Your Community Foundation is dedicated to creating community connections. In doing so, we honor the fact that we live in relationship with each other as a social beings and in the context of our various environments: work, family, built, and natural.

Community Foundation connections multiply our ability to have powerful results. The whole that is created by these community connections is far greater than the sum of the individual parts. With endowed funds designed to provide grants in perpetuity, we also connect across time with a forever perspective.

We connect donors to ways of meeting their philanthropic goals. We link nonprofit agencies with resources -- informational, relational, and financial -- which assist them in achieving their missions. We build community among donors with shared interests. We convene community volunteers to make grant recommendations as a review team.

We link funders and grant seekers. We unite dreams for a better community with proven service providers and young organizations in order to achieve lasting impact.

We also see our entire portfolio of grants through the lens of creating community connections. Grants to an organization to bring its services to a community center, grants to five collaborative food programs, and multiyear grants for youth employment in a variety of locations are great examples of the connections that are crafted with multiple grants.

Sometimes connections are strong, sometimes they are weak, and sometimes they are in need of healing. Fascinating learning experiences and powerful changes can happen as a result of caring for these connections.

More and more people are coming to the Community Foundation for advice; the synergy of engagement delivers new ways of thinking and new solutions to our problems.

And in 15 years, with gratitude for generously donated resources, we have designed, built, and nurtured a dynamic web of connections engaging best practices, innovative models of services, and involved donors.

Through the connections that come from prudent stewardship of gifts, engaging grant reviews, and thoughtful community education, we have earned the unique position of serving as the custodian of our community's philanthropic capital.

Thanks to so many generous connections with us, we have a fifteen-year track record of consistently delivering and growing meaningful, measurable, and financially sustainable outcomes for the people we serve in Tompkins County.

Gifts and Donor Engagement

Grants and Community Relationships

quote Community Foundation Donor Advisor

It is about what I envision the future to be like for my family….planting seeds for the community and our own family.