cc  >> Jeanan Yasiri:  Welcome, everyone.  Welcome to "Building a Civil  Society Through the Nonprofit  Sector," a Communiversity  session offered through the UW  Center for Nonprofits within the  University of Wisconsin School  of Human Ecology.  I'm Jeanan Yasiri and I have the  privilege of serving as the  executive director of the  center.  As we begin today, I'd like to  extend thanks to our partners  who support our Communiversity  series.  The UW Division of Continuing  Studies, the Oscar Rennebohm  Foundation, the Alliant Energy  Foundation, the Morgridge Center  for Public Service Challenge  Grant, and the Brittingham Fund.  Additionally, we'd like to thank  our media partners, Wisconsin  Public Television and their  University Place crew, for  taping tonight's lecture.  Tonight I'm very pleased to  introduce our special guest,  Kathleen Woit.  Kathleen has been a leader in  not-for-profit organizations  here in Wisconsin since 1985.  She earned a PhD in  administration from Madison,  UW-Madison, with an emphasis on  nonprofit management, and has  held positions as Assistant  Chancellor for University  Relations at UW-Whitewater and  at UW-Milwaukee.  And she has also served as vice  president of fund development  and community initiatives for  Meriter Health Services. 

 She's been president of the  Madison Community Foundation  since 1997 and in that role she  works with individuals and  nonprofit organizations to  develop permanent funds to  benefit charitable organizations  throughout Dane County,  Wisconsin, and beyond.  She is a frequent speaker and  presenter on leadership,  nonprofit governance, and the  strategic planning process.  As many of us know, Kathleen has  provided great service to our  community on many nonprofit and  community boards.  She currently serves on the  board of Edgewood College and  M&I Bank of Madison.  Kathleen has been honored with  the Urban League's  Whitney L. Young Award.  She is a WYCA Woman of  Distinction, and is a recipient  of the 2010 Best of Madison  Business Award, inducted into  the Business Hall of Fame just  this year.  We're delighted to include  Kathleen as part of our series.  She's been a huge proponent of  our work at the center and our  degree programs within the  School of Human Ecology in  nonprofit issues in particular.  We're pleased to have her join  us to discuss the role of  community foundations in  building a civil society.  Please join me in welcoming  Kathleen Woit. 

 (applause)  >> Kathleen Woit:  Thank you, Jeanan.  I am a big proponent of this  center because there were years  when Indiana University was the  only major university in the  country that looked at  philanthropy in a professional  manner.  But as I'm going to discuss  throughout this talk, the  paradigm there, too, has  obviously had to do an  incredible shift because there,  like for the rest of us,  philanthropy meant simply  "fund raising."  And now it's a whole different  ball game as we will discuss  throughout this discussion  tonight.  What I want to do tonight is, I  have only ten or eleven slides  and I'm going to talk from them,  but hopefully not just reiterate  them to you.  I will bring in best practices  from community foundations  throughout the United States.  I will update you from very  recent research, which I'm very  happy to say there is some of  that now in the field.  And then we will have some time  to talk about what might  interest you particularly among  the points that I am hoping to  make tonight.  I will talk about the Madison  Community Foundation in the  context of community foundations  in the broadest sense.  I always say, I try to paint a  picture when someone says to me,  "What in the world is a  community foundation?"  Because it is very,  very broad in scope.  But what I actually do is try to  paint a picture of a very large  umbrella. 

 And under the umbrella lies a  trust agreement.  A trust agreement that is  financial, that is legal, and is  full of promise between the  community foundation board and  the donor.  A community foundation is an  umbrella that is a 501(c)(3),  but I like to say it is not a  charity unto itself, because it  is not a nonprofit fundraising  body like many nonprofits, but  it is a place for nonprofits,  donors, and the community to  come together.  The community foundation idea is  based on synergy and the idea of  catalyzing things so that the  synergy of coming together makes  the parts much more important  than the whole.  A community foundation addresses  not only the most critical and  persistent challenges, but in  the case of many community  foundations, we spend a great  deal of time building on assets,  not just seeing the community as  a challenge, but a community  full of assets that bring great  joy and great quality of life to  its residents.  Community foundations produce  lasting and wide ranging  results.  And we're going to talk about  impact being the most important  product that a community  foundation can realize as we go  forward 2010 and beyond.  A community foundation does hold  permanent endowments, yes.  In fact, it is many times the  core business of the community  foundation to build permanent  funds as it was for the Madison  Community Foundation for many,  many years.  However, we are also seeing a  great need to be more flexible,  more welcoming, more nimble as  we go forward in dealing with  donors who do not have the  dollars to have their own  permanent fund, but maybe have  dollars that they want to  contribute to a pool of funds  that, when put together, can  make a major impact. 

 So we at our foundation are  definitely, for all the years  I've been there, been looking at  ways to be just that, more  welcoming.  Instead of having to have  $10,000 or $25,000 to start a  fund, we have the Acorn Society,  which allows a donor to give  $1,000 a year for ten years.  They keep the interest in their  funds.  We do not charge any interest,  and voila, we have a lot of fund  holders, including myself and my  staff, that never in a million  years thought we would be part  of a community foundation as a  fund holder.  Financial portfolios are a major  part of a community foundation.  Once you have a corpus  of 50 million or 100 million,  then you are able to participate  in a very wide array of fund  management tools, and again,  putting together a lot of money  in a community is more  efficient, makes a lot of sense,  and you are pretty well  guaranteed that you will have  more interest coming in than if  we all did it by ourselves.  So community foundation,  permanent funding, impact on a  community, a lot of funds and  donors coming together to do  really important things.  All of it built on the word  "trust."  Trust and promise.  Trust that the funds will be  there at present to fund things  that are of critical importance  to the community, and the  promise that those funds will be  there for future visions also.  In talking about the Madison  Community Foundation for just a  moment, I would like to point  out, I have friends in the  audience, one of them is Carol  Tussant, who was a board member  in the '80s when probably a lot  of the action happened in order  that we now have a very viable  community foundation. 

 She was also on the team that  hired me, so I will love her no  matter what forever.  (laughter)  Talk about trust.  We do have it, and we've had  many happy moments together  planning.  We also have Steve Goldberg from  the Cuna Mutual Foundation, and  we are very good friends.  And one of my staff is here,  Paul Hausman.  And many others that I know and  like so well.  At present, the Madison  Community Foundation enhances  our community by encouraging and  managing long-term philanthropy.  There is going to be a major  shift in that mission statement  by the end of this year.  Instead of saying "encouraging  and managing" long-term  philanthropy, we're going to  have the word "leadership" knit  into that mission, because not  only do we wish to encourage  long-term giving and impact, we  need to be leaders in making  that happen in Dane County.  So our board will be working on  this starting in August, and  many of the things we're talking  about today are on the agenda  for our board meetings for the  rest of the year. 

 Paul, what am I doing here?  Oh, here it is.  Okay, the history of community  foundations is rather  interesting, in that they sprang  up in the United States sort of  because there were people who  intuitively felt that there was  a vehicle missing in their  communities to bring people  together.  And I have been fortunate.  When I travel, I tend to visit  the large community foundations,  or those community foundations  that I think are doing something  very interesting.  So I have been to the Cleveland  Foundation.  The Cleveland Foundation was  begun in 1913, which is a very  long time ago given all that has  happened in US history.  The Cleveland Foundation was  founded by a group of citizens  who wanted to do settlement  housing for immigrants coming  into Cleveland.  That was their aim, their  objective.  And for the first years, they  built up a corpus in their  foundation for them to be able  to have a long lasting impact on  this particular area.  As time went on, there was a lot  of concentration in Cleveland  and some of the other older  foundations with what we fondly  refer to as the "dead man era."  And the dead man era simply  means that a lot of the banks'  trust departments had funds that  had been there for a very long  time that unto themselves were  not having a great deal of  impact. 

 So the old banks handed those  family trusts over to the  Cleveland Foundation, and for  years and years, that was the  money that they were using to  give out grants in their  community.  The Milwaukee Foundation was  also founded in the early 1900s.  The Chicago Community Trust was  founded in that time period, as  was the Boston Foundation.  So it is not unusual that those  major cities were among the  first to have this wonderful  idea.  The Great Depression and World  War II certainly influenced our  community.  In 1942, a group of  businesspeople, mostly working  downtown Madison, had decided  that they were going to raise  about a half a million dollars  for some immediate needs that  they saw coming, many as a  result of World War II.  Now, Madison in 1942  was 50,000 people.  And to have raised almost half a  million dollars in 1942 was  extraordinary.  For Madison to have had a vision  that we needed not only the Red  Feather Chest, which some of us  know as the predecessor to  United Way, 'cause I remember  that red feather, not only were  we going to have that, but we  were going to have a community  trust side by side.  I, to this day, find that  extraordinary and I'm proud to  be a part of a vision that was  created so many years ago. 

 About half of that money was  spent and the remaining $263,000  was placed in the trust  department of what is now US  Bank.  And stayed there for many, many  years.  There was always a community  board governing our foundation  and the foundations that we're  going to talk about across the  country.  Which is a very significant  differentiation between a  community foundation and  national organizations such as  United Way.  We have never had to report to a  national organization.  We've always been able to work  among our community given the  relationships and the knowledge  and expertise of leaders in this  community and that is a huge  advantage.  To make a long story short, the  community foundation was heavily  influenced by tax changes in  1969.  IRS basically said, if you're  going to have a trust in a bank  trust department, you have to  make it work.  You have to raise some money,  you have to give away some  money.    So that did activate the  foundation. 

 And then in the mid '80s, Carol  Tussant worked with the  foundation and then in 1986 Jane  Coleman, my immediate  predecessor, spent 11 years  building the foundation.  The age of democratization of  community philanthropy simply  meant that across the United  States, this idea of having a  community foundation really  started to catch on and they  started popping up in other  cities all the way across the  United States.  There are about 25 in Wisconsin  alone now.  Then the age of commercial  charity came along, and that's  been a major force, I think, in  our thinking differently now.  You have the Schwab funds, the  Vanguard, the Fidelity, that are  offering charitable vehicles at  a very low price.  And I will only say this, that  you can press a button and have  a transfer of money to your  charity, but that does not make  you a part of your community  trust.  It does not put you together  with groups of like-minded  citizens.  You are not receiving any  information about the viability  of the charities you're giving  to, even if they're in another  country, actually.  And you do not see sometimes the  immediate joy of what you've  done with your neighbors.  That's all I'm going to say  about that. 

 2005 signaled a whole 'nother,  everybody stop and think about  what you're doing, period.  And that's when some of the  research that we're using  tonight began to appear.  After a long, long drought of  not having anything written, now  we have begun to have some  really significant findings.  The bibliography for the things  I'm going to talk about is  available in the back on the  table by the water.  The information mostly, though,  comes from what we call our  trade organization, the Council  on Foundations.  And it comes to us because we  are members of that organization  and we do rely on them for legal  issues and for trend-setting  information.  But we are going to spend all of  our time now talking about 2010  and not going back historically.  But I always say to my staff,  "You've got to go back to go  forward."  You have to have new  information put in the context  of what came before.  I think sometimes that's missing  now with everything so available  as far as information.  Sometimes the historical context  of the decisions we are making  so quickly today is lost and I  worry about that. 

 The old and new fundamentals for  community foundations are pretty  simple.  Under the old regime, we would  go to conferences, and we would  run into people we were  competing with in our minds,  anyway.  And we would say, "How much are  you worth today?  What's your portfolio value?"  And they'd say,  "Well, we're $100 million"  or "We're $25 million"  or whatever they would say.  Now, first of all, you can't  really do that because all  community foundations are not  equal.  They're based on the community.  So if you asked me what the  value of our foundation is, it's  about $122 million, by the way,  we are talking about Dane County  only, all right?  Because our grants go to Dane  County from our unrestricted  dollars.  However, funds can come in from  all over the country.  So our donor base for getting  money is about half a million  people.  If you ask the Great Milwaukee  Foundation what their value is,  they will say half a billion  dollars, and they are five  counties.  So they have many, many more in  their pool than we do. 

 If you ask the Arizona Community  Foundation, I don't know what  their value is, it's a lot,  that's the whole state of  Arizona.  So the demographics play a huge  role in playing the game of  "what's your portfolio worth?"  Well, I'm happy to say, we're  done with that now.  Because it's not how much your  portfolio is worth, but what are  you doing that demonstrates  leadership in the community in  which you reside?  Which means, a whole new  measure.  You go from easy quantitative  data collecting to a whole new  way of measuring impact.  And sometimes it's not that  easy, but if you have a very  clear vision and a very clear  strategic plan, you are probably  going to be ahead of the game in  doing that.  We are going to learn, as CEOs  of the major foundations, we're  going to learn in the next six  months to a year exactly what  measures are we going to use  that will not only make sense to  our board of governors, but will  make sense to the donors and the  partners that have aligned with  us.  So that's going to be my work  for the next six months for  sure.  The old way is to give a grant  to an organization as a  foundation and have them do an  evaluation back within a year of  the end of their grant.  So if we give a grant to Perry  Ecton from Habitat, he has to  report back that he has built  the home that we helped support.  That's the old way of doing it. 

 The new way will be, "Perry, you  built the house.  Now tell me about the impact  that has made on the family  living in that house over the  long run."  That is so completely  different as far as a mindset  goes.  We used to give grants to the  opera so that high schoolers  could come and see the  rehearsal, and we used to ask  for the evaluation.  How many youth went to the  opera?  And we would get back a figure  of 80 went to the opera.  That's not the question we're  asking anymore.  The question we're asking now  is, how did going to the opera  influence the lives of those  youth?  Did it give them a greater  understanding of society by  going to the opera?  Did it make them want to pursue  voice lessons or a music degree?  Or is this going to be a  lifelong hobby?  Or is it just simply not what  you do to a 14-year-old?  So that is a completely  different question.  So now, when people are asking  community foundations for  grants, they really have to have  a vision of what they are going  to change in the community, and  who are the partners going to be  that are aligning with that  vision in addition to the  community foundation?  And when we work with Cuna  Mutual Foundation, or the  Rennebohm Foundation in Madison,  for instance, we always are  looking at, what's the vision  and what's the impact and what  major asset are we building on  in Dane County before we do  anything else?  The old way of attaining  sustainability for a community  foundation was to charge a fee  for every fund that we managed.  And in that fee, happily, was  the money management, yes, a lot  of research that we would share  with donors, a lot of ideas and  planning we would go through  with donors and nonprofits.  We still are charging them 1%,  but every time the market does  anything negative whatsoever, it  has a direct impact on the grant  making dollars or the dollars we  have to sustain our foundation.  So you're all nodding, "Yes,  that's like our life, too."  But remember, we have over  $120 million in donor money, and  the promise has been made that  we are here for them in  perpetuity so it becomes a whole  different level of expectations. 

 So the new paradigm is going to  be, what business model should  we be looking at that will allow  us to have other earned income  in addition to charging our fund  holders?  So that's going to be part of  this discussion.  The IRS calls us all  "not for profit."  That is simply their  designation for us.  It is not an excuse to poorly  manage any kind of charitable  fund, and I really, really think  that message is beginning to  take.  It certainly is alive and well  in Dane County.  The executives that we have  welcomed into the county in the  last several months or year have  been exceptionally credentialed  and I for one am thrilled that   when we are talking to these new  executives, we don't have to go  back and explain what the  guidelines are for dealing with  our foundation.  They come well prepared to talk  vision with us and this is going  to be a very exciting time for  our working in this community on  any number of projects.  So our new model for revenue is  to be determined, but we have  already put our toes in the  water a little bit by offering  specialized services to several  corporate foundations, American  Girl being one, and several  family foundations.  And there is a slight increase  in the revenue that that does  bring in.  So that's going to be another  huge discussion at the board  level.  Forces shaping the next era  starting in 2010. 

 I don't have to tell you what  economic means.  I don't think my house is ever  going to be worth what I paid  for it.  I am just making that  assumption.  I have sucked it up, I'm happy  with the house, I'm going  forward, and that's the end of  my worry about it.  I wouldn't be surprised if many  of you thought the very same  thing.  Life is never going to be like  it was when we were all buying  second and third homes and  flying to Europe on the weekends  and doing all the things that  some of us watched people do.  So what does that mean?  Somebody said, "I don't  understand why he's not giving  right now."  And I smiled and looked at  this person and said, "Oh,  do you know  what you're worth today?"  This was in January.  "Well, no."  And I said, "Neither does he."  And here we go with another  blip in the stock market.  So there's never going to be  that casual consumption that we  were enjoying over the last  couple years.  It's just not happening. 

 So the economy is forcing new  business models more than  anything else.  The demographics I don't have to  go into.  We all know that the  demographics of every major city  in the United States has changed  considerably and will continue  to change, and the gap between  the very wealthy and the very  poor will continue to widen in  the next couple years for sure.  So we have to be very aware of  that in everything that we do  and decide.  Regulation, the IRS is our very  dearest friend, only second to  our audit committee, and we have  gone to conferences when we had  some extra money, which hasn't  been recently, and we get the  idea of transparencies.  The 990s are on, you just press  a button on your computer.  Our board was forced to go all  the way through our 990s, right,  Frank?  So that they were completely  aware of every little nuance of  the community foundation.  So donors have a right, and take  us up on, seeing any information  that they want to see at any  point in time.  And it has to be ready.  So we have a wonderful  investment committee, the best  that I've ever seen. 

 We have a great audit committee.  And the board in general has  spent an extraordinary amount of  time in the last year or two in  looking at that whole situation  of regulation and what we can  see coming down the road that  not only affects us as a  foundation, but affects all of  our donors in one way or  another, too.  And then I already mentioned the  S, the V, and the F group.  So I won't go into commercial  sector any longer, but we have  law firms, we have CPA firms, we  have financial advisors, we have  everybody who has found that  charity is a tremendously  rewarding career to go into.  And you know what?  That's okay, because why  shouldn't we have competition  like everybody else?  It just makes it more and more  helpful to have a great staff  and a very diligent board of  governors and it puts some zip  in my day to look around and see  that we're not the only game in  town.  There are lots of games in town  and we all better be on our toes  and play the best game that we  can possibly play, because our  community deserves it.  So, we talked about the paradigm  shifts, and I'm not going to go  into that again on this slide,  but those are the things that  everybody is looking at.  And all the conferences that  people are going to are going to  feature those four shifts.  Strategic leadership roles.  I've told you that our community  foundation and many, many others  want to be leaders or expected  to be leaders and are setting  out to define more clearly what  that means as far as a role. 

 Shaping community discourse.  Some of us remember when we used  to have a platform in Madison,  it was called Civic Progress,  and it was run by the chamber of  commerce.  I haven't seen it in maybe ten,  twelve years.  But all it was, was an SOS,  everybody come together, all the  CEOs of the major corporations,  some of which aren't here  anymore, but many are.  Everybody come together, we have  an issue in this community we  want to talk about.  We have a guest speaker in town  that wants to show us what  models have worked other places.  And we had a discourse.  I would like very much for our  foundation to be a part, anyway,  of bringing that platform back  to Madison.  The last one that I went to was  at American Family, and as I  said, it was probably 15 years  ago.  And the subject was childcare in  the workplace. 

 And we had the CEO of 3M from  Minneapolis come in, and he was  talking about the model that 3M  used in order to offer quality  childcare to his employees.  I think Promega really took him  up on it and have just an  exceptional program.  But we have been missing that  for a lot of years, and we've  had some huge community issues,  some very recently, where it  would have been wonderful to  have had a leader or a group of  leaders bring together community  to just have discourse on the  topic.  It would make our decision  making go a lot faster.  Growing and linking local  leadership.  When we look at leadership in  our county, we are a very  leadership-y county.  I mean, everybody's involved in  Dane County and everybody has  access to everyone else and I  absolutely love that.  When I worked in Milwaukee way  back, I couldn't see the mayor.  I couldn't just call up the CEO  of Allen Bradley.  I had to get in line, and they  had to know me, and I had to be  introduced to the Bradley  Foundation. 

 It was a very patriarchal, very  official, formal way of doing  business.  Here, if we want to talk to the  mayor, we can go on his blog, of  course.  If we want to talk to the  governor, we can talk to the  governor.  Or we can talk to our alders and  everybody else, too, and that's  the fun of Madison and that's  the challenge of Madison.  But if you've ever worked  anywhere else, you just revel in  this whole idea that it's just a  free world around here and  everybody's voice can be heard.  So when we think about, who do  we link with?  The question is more, who do we  not link with?  Because everything seems to be  viable.  We do stay out of politics and  religion.  We do pretty well at that, I  think.  We have 2200 or 2300 nonprofits  in Dane County.  It's an awesome number, whatever  it might be. 

 They're all very active, they  all have missions and visions  and boards and fund development  people and CEOs and territories.  So we spend a lot of time on  that.  But we also spend a lot of time  linking with other foundations  in the county and region, and  they can be family foundations,  they can be private foundations,  they can be corporate  foundations.  Because we have to work together  to get these major projects  done.  If most of us aren't in  something, that project is going  to have a really hard time being  funded.  If we're working in south  Madison, for instance, we would  work with the hospitals, we  would work with the car dealers,  we would work with the library,  Urban League, the list goes on  and on.  Because we just do a map of the  neighborhood we are working in  and we come up with all the  major players with their  libraries, their churches, their  schools, it matters not.  If they're part of that  constituency and part of that  neighborhood, then they are a  part of how we do things.  We have been one of the first  funders of Thrive, which is a  seven county regional economic  development group that started  several years ago, because  economic development is one of  our seven focus areas.  We feel very strongly about  that, because you get into job  training, you get into  education, you get into things  that we really cannot turn our  back on at all, because it is  part of this quality of life in  this community. 

 And it's been a really very  interesting journey.  It started with Monona Terrace  in the early '90s.  You know that story, about the  Frank Lloyd Wright convention  center.  And at that time, the project  was as old as I was.  That was a while back.  So I was interested in that  project just as a citizen, and  then I found out that the  Madison Community Foundation  gave the first money as part of  the public campaign.  Some of you remember this.  It was a very risky thing to do.  It was very entrepreneurial and  out there and cool.  We didn't have that much money  back in those days. 

 We had about $20 million.  And the then-mayor came to my  predecessor and said, "How about  the community foundation making  a million dollar gift over-" I  guess, Carol, what was it, five  years?  And the board at that time said,  yes, they would lead an  $8 million campaign to get that  done.  We had the governor in, we had  the mayor in.  Every piece was in its place.  Well, after the $1 million from  the community foundation, then  the Evjue Foundation came in, I  think with $2 million, which  left $5 million to be raised.  Jerry Frautschi, coincidentally,  was a very generous donor to  Monona Terrace, which led him to  envision the idea for Overture.  So that project did a lot of  things in addition to its  obvious use.  So every time I think of our  little foundation, and I look at  that building, and we're all in  it a lot, I'm really proud.  So you'll see the Community Room  in Monona Terrace overlooking  the lake, and it is the site of  many, many happy nonprofit  gatherings.  So there's some risk involved in  being a broker, but it's the  only way to get other people in  to leverage your gift. 

 Government resources, I'm going  to show you in a minute, we  leverage a lot of those and so  does everyone else.  You have to be able to deal with  external money.  And in these days, there is  quite a bit of it, and the  spoils went to the most  innovative, creative,  fast-thinking organizations.  We, of course, spend a fair  amount of time looking at  high-impact philanthropists.  We have to do that.  We have to have our major  donors.  In this region they are  wonderful.  They are humble.  They are earnest.  All they want to do is provide  quality of life factors for the  residents of Dane County. 

 We should be very grateful for  them, and we should hope that we  will always give recognition as  appropriate to people who step  up to the plate so often.  Local systems for reform.  We don't get real into that, but  there are other community  foundations that do a lot of  policy and a lot of advocacy,  and I'll talk about them  briefly.  Board discussions that we're  having.  How do we fit into the larger  networks that I've been talking  about?  How can we really be  indispensable?  How can be the best there is for  philanthropic leadership?  How can we capitalize on the  fact that we are independent?  We don't have a national board,  we have a local board.  How can we capitalize on that  and still create interdependence  with the partners that we are  going to meet even more in the  future?  How can we carefully experiment  with tools that will allow our  donors more flexibility than  starting just a straight  endowment?  And we've been working on that.  We have a new fund.  And our new fund allows donors  to spend down over ten years,  rather than to have a permanent  endowment.  You have to look at generations  and what they need.  What motivates generations to  give?  It's very different if you're 30  and your father is 75. 

 They are completely different  buttons that need to be pressed.  So we are looking at those and  rolling them out, but very, very  carefully because everything  goes back to our trust  agreement.  And we will be looking at new  business models.  This is going to be kind of fun  to talk for a minute about what  other foundations do, because  there is such a high level of  diversification depending on  what the needs of the community  are.  Greater Milwaukee Foundation has  commissioned research to help  them more fully understand their  education challenges,  particularly in  grade K through 8.  There are so many problems K-4  that those problems make it very  difficult when you look at their  high school graduation rate.  So they are actually spending  grants to do that kind of  research for the city school  system.  They are advocating for policy  change.  They have several employees  whose only job is to work in the  area of policy.  We do not have that at our  foundation at this point. 

 50% to 75% of their unrestricted  money goes to poverty and how to  lessen it, how to deal with it,  how to understand it.  And of course, they have a very  large contingency of donors  helping them.  Education for inner city kids  and the scholarships that go  along with it.  When I started at the foundation  14 years ago, Milwaukee wasn't  doing any of these things.  They were giving out grants to  much more traditional topics.  The Greater Kansas City  Foundation is actually seeking  grants from donors for  leadership opportunities for  their foundation.  They are actually in a  fundraising mode to do that.  As far as their revenues during  this down time in the market,  they have established some  contracts for back office  services for nonprofits and  other family foundations.  I think you're going to see us  all maybe doing that.  That takes some of the load off  of the individual donor funds. 

 The Foundation for the  Carolinas, which is actually two  states combined into one, have a  center for civic leadership that  was established in 2008.  Now, we have the nonprofit  center, and this is an academic  setting with community  discourse.  This is strictly a community  discourse platform, I guess  you'd have to say, and that  appeals to me.  And their major emphasis is  coalition building in the area  of housing.  So they are very specific about  what their grant making is going  to do.  The Boston Foundation, I've also  visited them, and they were  strictly a foundation 20 years  ago of a bunch of trusts that  had come to them from a bank.  And when I told them that the  Madison Community Foundation had  $30 million in unrestricted  grant making to give back to our  community, they couldn't believe  it, and here I'm talking to the  Boston Foundation.  Most of their funds at that  point were all endowments and  they were all restricted to  very, very narrow niches.  Now what they have done is, they  are developing a civic  leadership role by going out and  getting money from a lot of  donors to form pools of  interest.  We have, for instance, a fund  for women in our foundation. 

 That is a pooled fund, where  hundreds of donors, maybe a  thousand by now, have come  together with smaller gifts, and  we now have an endowment of over  $1 million and a grant making  committee that gives to women  and children.  That's a pooled fund.  You're going to see more and  more of that.  We have seven areas of interest,  so we could have a pooled fund  for the endowment.  We could do one for children.  We could do one for the elderly,  the environment, etc.  And I do think with this young  generation, this is going to be  a real big thing.  The key issues in Boston for the  foundation are home  foreclosures, food and fuel  costs, and workforce  development.  Their portfolio today is worth  $750 million, but you can guess  that that's probably not enough  money for a huge city like  Boston with all that could be  happening there.  The Baton Rouge Area Foundation,  you know that area has been so  significantly hit. 

 They have gotten into real  estate investment funds, and  they are redeveloping troubled  neighborhoods.  You see, Perry, there's a lot of  this housing going on.  The Community Foundation of  Silicon Valley is a riot.  They merged in 2007 and they now  have a $1 billion community  foundation, and they are  fighting poverty.  If you have ever been to Palo  Alto and know those housing  prices within 25 miles of  Stanford, you know that a  starter home's a million  dollars.  You would also guess that there  are a whole lot of people that  live in that 25 mile circle that  can't afford rent in an  apartment.  The CEO of the Minneapolis  Foundation left Minneapolis and  went to this foundation, merged  it, is going to take it head on.  And there is no question that he  will be effective.  The Madison Community Foundation  is really positioned to change  paradigms.  We're going to lead, not  encourage. 

 We have a large unrestricted  pool, one of the biggest,  really, of any of the community  foundations I've visited.  With our $30 million, 75% of the  grants we make, which would be  4.5% of $30 million  throughout the county,  75% of those grants are  proactive, which means we are  engaged in a partnership.  We didn't sit back and wait for  somebody to apply to us anymore.  People came to us and said,  we have a vision.  We have a dream.  We have an asset we want to  build on.  And we may work a year with  those partners in order to  realize some really major  impact.  If you look at our library  contributions throughout Dane  County, we have put thousands of  dollars into every library in  Dane County.  The building of them, the  expansion of their collections,  and the building of endowments.  Why was this helpful?  Because in this economic  environment, a library is a  free, a safe, a joyful place  from the children's corner to  the computer section where one  can get a job and use the  computers. 

 Now they're adding Kindles, and  they're very up to speed on  what's going on, and they really  have become centers where people  get together and enjoy each  other's company or have hobbies  or discourse in their community.  So that would be more the kind  of thing we're looking at now  than just simply a grant to a  library to build it.  That's a completely different  shift.  Our donors are becoming more and  more co-investors with us.  We send out our grant ideas.  Many of our donors write  additional checks to those  organizations to make things  happen more quickly.  We also have affiliate funds in  parts of Dane County, Middleton,  Columbus, which is just outside,  Lodi, DeForest, we're working in  Monona.  So we're really beginning to  expand outside of greater  Madison.  We have staff expertise now to  do it and we have a lot of  interest from a lot of people to  become part of something bigger  than themselves.  This is a fun thing which we  call our "tree."  This just shows you the work  now that many community  foundations are doing and we do  trees so that we can track how  one $100,000 gift spurs all  kinds of ideas and brings more  and more donors into working  with us on impact. 

 The Pheasant Branch/Creekland  purchase, that was going to be a  purchase, that Pheasant  Creekland was going to be  purchased.  The city council of Middleton  was meeting that night at 8:00.  They were $125,000 short.  Volunteers had raised over  $500,000 and they just  collapsed.  They were tired, they didn't  know where else to go.  I read it in the paper in the  morning, we called our board.  By 12:00 noon, we had $100,000  worth of our proactive money.  We called one of our board  members we knew was into the  environment big time.  He gave another $25,000.  We called the leaders and we  said, "You've got your money."  And there are a lot of people  that I now know live in that  conservancy and we are thrilled. 

 What happened then, we looked at  our environmental stewardship  and we looked at learning,  because that is a wonderful area  of greater Madison where people  walk and they bike and they take  their children.  It's really extraordinary.  So what we saw happen was, all  the things that you see under  "philanthropic impact" have  happened in the last maybe two  years.  Paul Hausman has been very  active in this area.  We have had new funds started.  We have had the Middleton  Community Endowment started.  We have a Clean Wisconsin  challenge out right now.  We gave $100,000, they're going  to be raising $300,000.  We got $86,000 state for them.  Today the Friends of Pheasant  Branch have started an endowment  to sustain their projects and we  have easement money. 

 And it's just been extraordinary  to watch this.  So our $100,000 gift has now  ended up being a $917,000 gift  for Middleton.  And that's what we want to do.  We want to encourage, we want to  leverage, we want to educate, we  want to lead, we want to  facilitate.  We want to do all that.  And when we do this tree, the  staff know I love this tree,  because it keeps growing and  growing.  Current status of community  foundations.  We're the 77th out of 100 of the  largest foundations if you look  just at assets.  And remember, we can't do that  anymore after right now.  Gifts to all community  foundations did decline by 20%  last year and we have no reason  to think that isn't going to  happen again this year. 

 All community foundations have  had to rewind back to 2006 and  look at what we have now and how  we're going to do it  differently, and hopefully over  the last hour I have given you a  lot of suggestions as to how  we're going to be doing that.  The Columbus Community  Foundation does a survey.  We just got it in April of this  year.  So we do know what our  colleagues are doing.  There are about 700 viable  community foundations in the  United States and they are now,  the idea is spreading very  slowly, but spreading to Europe,  too, and some of my colleagues  are going over there.  They're not in the big cities  where you would think they would  be.  It's like the Ukraine, for  instance, and places like that,  that are seriously looking at  this.  So I have hit 7:00, my slides  are through, and it is time for  us to talk, ask questions of  each other, clarify anything  that you would like to clarify.  And I think we have maybe 20, 25  minutes, Jeanan?  And if some of you have to leave  for parts more interesting than  this, you certainly can go.  >> Yasiri: Please do, thank you. 

 (applause)