Nonprofit Soars Past Its Goals for Fund-Raising

A nonprofit group that awarded $1.5 million in grants last year to Ventura County causes has soared past a key fund-raising goal, setting it on a pace that could move it into the top 100 community foundations nationwide by 2006.

In 1994, the Ventura County Community Foundation set the ambitious goal of securing $40 million in charitable assets by the end of 2000. Six years later, the group has easily topped that--by a whopping $16 million.

“It’s pretty darned amazing,” said Kate McLean, the group’s executive director.

Through the charity, individuals or families can establish a permanent endowment fund that generates income from interest and dividends. Revenue from the fund is disbursed annually in the family’s name in the form of grants to various community groups.

Families can stay involved and choose where the money goes each year or leave it up to the foundation.

At the end of 2000, the organization had $56 million in assets. Roughly $30 million of that is cash, the rest in pledged gifts.

It’s not the first time the foundation has exceeded its own expectations. When the group decided to raise $5 million in endowments by the end of 1994, it met the goal with six months to spare.

Since then, 80 funds have multiplied to 276 funds that have contributed to everything from air quality improvement projects to the numbers of computers accessible to poor children in Oxnard. Two of the larger funds are Women’s Legacy, which doles out grants for projects benefiting women, and Destino 2000, which focuses on Latino needs. Each fund has raised $400,000 in endowments that spin off about $20,000 annually for grants.

“Ventura County [Community Foundation] has made some remarkable strides in the brief period of time they’ve been in existence,” said Chuck Slosser, executive director of the Santa Barbara Community Foundation, an organization that has been around since the 1920s and has $150 million in permanent endowments.

“It’s taken us 72 years to get where we are, and they’ve been able to get to the $50-million mark very quickly,” Slosser said.

Part of that is attributed to Ventura County’s population growth and the fact that community foundations are the fastest-growing form of philanthropy in the nation. But Slosser said raising that amount of money is still no simple task.

“The community foundation has positioned itself well within Ventura County to be the conduit for philanthropy there,” he said. “I think good grant-making attracts the interest of people in the community.”

Steven Lawrence, director of research at the New York-based Foundation Center, said Ventura County’s foundation ranked 175th out of 443 in the country for grant-making in 1998.

If it grows at the same pace it has in the past six years, Lawrence said, the group could easily break into the top 100--where annual giving is at least $3.1 million--in five years. The median giving amount among the nation’s community foundations was $642,000 in 1998, he said.

“Certainly the growth of the Ventura County Community Foundation assets has been exceptional,” he said. “We’ve seen foundations experiencing that kind of dramatic growth more than we had before, but by the same token it’s a very rare occurrence.”

The group began in 1988 with a $50,000 endowment from the Teague family, longtime farmers and ranchers in Ventura County.

Alan Teague, board chairman for the organization’s first 10 years, personally called the nine other original board members to ask them to participate, board member Joe Brown said. Most of them were active in the United Way at the time.

“There was this void between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Once we did it, it seemed obvious,” he said. “But I don’t think any of us thought when we started it that it would be quite as successful as it’s been.”

Among the many beneficiaries of community foundation grants is the Community Literacy Project, which operates a bookmobile that travels into poorer neighborhoods around the county.

“Each year our funding is touch and go,” program coordinator Cherie Moraga said. “If it weren’t for the community foundation, we wouldn’t be running now.”

Other groups the foundation works with include the Boys & Girls Clubs and the Alliance for the Arts, which supports performances and exhibits at the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks.

About 40 scholarships, ranging from $500 to $2,000, go to Ventura County high school students each year. A grant by the foundation also created a directory of college scholarships available to students in the county.

Brown said he believes the foundation will grow by another $40 million to $50 million in the next five years. “We have lots of room to grow,” he said.

Brown will be recognized next month along with the group’s nine other founders, all but two of whom have since retired from the board.

The event will be attended by about 500 people at Spanish Hills Golf & Country Club in Camarillo.

“This foundation would not exist if it were not for those 10 people,” McLean said. “They literally wrote checks from their pockets to pay for lights and rent.”

Brown, who describes himself as a “semiretired” real estate broker, said the community foundation is the most rewarding of his many charitable involvements.

“All of those dollars are going to get to thousands of people,” he said. “It’s nice to be a little part of something like that.”