The Arkansas Community Foundation turns 50 this year. Since its founding, ACF has made more than $600 million worth of grants in support of Arkansas communities. Today, ACF is announcing how it’s marking the half-century milestone.
Last week, Jessica Hughes Ford, who became the organization’s president and CEO late last year, and Jodi Dilday, vice president of Northwest operations, came to the Anthony and Susan Hoy News Studio to discuss both the past and the future of Arkansas Community Foundation. Jessica Hughes Ford says ACF’s mission is straightforward.
Jessica Hughes Ford: Arkansas Community Foundation is a statewide organization, a nonprofit, but the largest grantmaker in the state. So we make more grants than any other entity, not by the amount that we make — so we’re not a Walton Family Foundation or a private foundation — but through our affiliate network, which is 29 offices statewide, we make more grants to nonprofits than any other entity. So we really have our finger on the pulse of the nonprofit landscape in the state of Arkansas.
Kyle Kellams: What does it take to make that number of grants?
Ford: It takes a fantastic staff, but it also takes local intel. So when we say that we’re local and we’re statewide, those 29 affiliate offices have an executive director, but they’re governed by a local board. So money that is raised in Wynne, for Cross County, is decided by a local board of directors in Cross County, where that money should go. So it goes local money for local causes made by local decision-makers.
Jodi Dilday: In addition to what the foundation does in terms of our grantmaking, the other thing it takes is a lot of generous Arkansans. So there are over 2,300 individual, what we call component funds, underneath the umbrella of the Arkansas Community Foundation. So my husband and I, we have a charitable fund. We do the giving that we choose to do to our favorite nonprofits through our fund. So it’s a lot of people in Arkansas that are giving back to their local communities.
Kellams: Is it somewhat like a liaison between donors and nonprofits?
Dilday: I like to say we’re a lot like a private foundation, except that there’s a lot of folks who use the community foundation as their foundation. So we are the personal philanthropy group for individuals who want to have some knowledge and insight into local needs and the governance of local nonprofits. But we also have the tools in place so we can help donors invest those dollars until they are ready to grant them out.
Kellams: Spring 1976 is when ACF started. What do we know about that first year or so?
Ford: Former Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller had an amazing woman named Mary McLeod who knew what was going on nationally, like with the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts and the East Coast philanthropy scene. She was aware of that, and she thought Arkansas needs a community foundation.
So the concept of a community foundation was relatively new and emerging on the East and West coasts. She had his ear and said we should do this for the state of Arkansas. Using his social capital, he brought together the right people.
Mary and several others gathered. They ate at a restaurant in Little Rock called Jack and Suzanne’s, which a lot of people may remember, and the idea of the community foundation was formed. And just within the first year they made three grants — one to AETV, formerly AETV, Arkansas PBS, the Arkansas Arts Center at the time, and then essentially a free press initiative that was supporting press statewide.
They made three grants really quickly, and it was born. And then it was just all hands on deck. It was who knew who and who could start a fund and how do we build this and put this together. And then it was in the late ’90s when the affiliate system emerged, and from there it just exploded with generosity and great staff.
Kellams: I’m sure you’re going to mark this half-century.
Yes. 50th anniversary
Kellams: How?
Ford: Using the intel that I talked about before, understanding local needs statewide, we have pulled together a tremendous amount of data that says what are the most important needs in Arkansas, what is most pressing from corner to corner.
If you put a tic tac toe board over the state of Arkansas and you break it up into nine regions, which is kind of what we did, you'll see a plethora of needs, whether it's early literacy or food insecurity or access to child care. And so we thought, you know, let's make a difference where it's actually needed now. And my predecessor, Heather Larkin, had the vision starting about eighteen months ago to say we're about to turn 50. So let's start socking away some money. So she started saving, and now we have a little more than a million dollars that we want to give away.
So we divided the state into nine regions. We picked the nonprofits in those nine regions that are making a difference in those areas, and we’re granting more than $1 million this year in total to 47 nonprofits. That math might not seem like it’s mathing. We did 18 statewide that are $30,000 and $50,000 to rising nonprofits that are kind of new and innovative, and then legacy nonprofits that have been around for a really long time. So we’re making a nod to our past and the future.
But then we also gave those 29 affiliates $10,000 each and said, you know your area best. We’re celebrating our 50th anniversary. Get your board together and make a grant to a nonprofit serving in one of those cause areas. So that’s what they’re doing. So the math is 47 nonprofits statewide and more than a million dollars in grants.
Dilday: And I want to point out that that is just a million dollars. That is a special initiative grant. The Community Foundation does well over generally $60 million in grants each year. But this is just how we’re marking our anniversary. It’s our anniversary. We don’t want gifts. We’re giving gifts back to the community.
Ford: That’s right. There’s no fundraising campaign. There’s no ask of anyone. And all of these grants, which I think this is really special, they’re unrestricted. So we call up Well Fed and we say, you’re getting $30,000 and you can do whatever you need to with it. You know your needs best. You’ve been around. We trust you. What do you need this for?
And it might be to update their database. And I’m not speaking for Well Fed, but any organization, they might need an executive director. They might want to put it right out into the mouths of the people that they’re feeding, whatever they need. We trust them to know that.
And that’s our experience as a community foundation, as a funder, is that these nonprofits, it’s something called trust-based philanthropy. We trust them. We've all been around long enough to know who's doing what, and we trust them to do whatever they need with this gift.
Kellams: Did those receiving nonprofits, did they know before the announcement that they had been selected?
Ford: I'll let Jody tell you about her experience.
Dilday: Really fun phone calls. I made a phone call and I said, I’m sorry for the late notice, but is there any way we can hop on a call today? And I said, you’re getting $50,000. And it was utter shock and surprise. And then we said, you had to keep this quiet until today, until January 21. So we made these phone calls a few weeks ago. We wanted them to be there in person if they could be.
But I could hear and they were actually articulating what they were planning, what they were dreaming about doing with this money falling from the sky that they just hadn’t budgeted for, they didn’t plan for. And they said, we have been needing to write new curriculum. We’re now going to be able to actually do the thing and write new curriculum.
Kellams: The actual anniversary is in March.
Ford: Correct.
Kellams: Will you do anything for that?
Ford: I think we’re going to do a nice social media post in the middle of March. We have another event planned later in April that will be more of the actual celebration of the 50th. But yeah, the third week in March is when, if our documents are correct, we think it was March 27 when the actual founding happened.
Kellams: Do things change in charitable giving and nonprofit giving over the course of half a century? You’re nodding.
Ford: I would love for Jody to answer that because she works with our donors.
Dilday: Certainly. And philanthropic giving changes year to year based on tax law changes, the different strategies that people might use to get money out the door. But certainly, I think over my career I've seen change and it's starting to swing back a little. There was a lot of community chest giving. So you think about the United Way and a lot of people would just give to the United Way and trust that the allocations Committee of the United Way would decide what their community needed.
Then folks started to become more active as volunteers, and they said, I want to give to the organization that I experience firsthand, the real work that they do. So I want to designate my dollars to this organization. And then they started saying, well, you know, this organization does four things. And the one thing I really like, so I want to designate my donation to this organization, to this program. So donors have become very savvy. They're very involved. They're very committed. They know the people. They know the staff. They know the clientele.
What I see now is a little bit of a swing back where people are maybe still designating, I want it to go to this organization. But like Jessica said, I'm so involved with that organization. I trust the leadership and I know that they'll do exactly what needs to be done. So that's one of the changes that I've seen.
Kellams: Do you sometimes notice a sense of relief with the people you're working with, who might want to engage in nonprofit or charitable giving philanthropy, that it can be something where you're not sure you want to know you're doing the right thing?
Dilday: I think that's where organizations like Community Foundations can be really helpful to donors because we have sort of an unbiased opinion. We can help people really narrow in on what it is that they want to do. For example, there's a fund holder that I work with who has said to me, I know that hunger is a real issue, who's doing good work in the hunger space. And I came back to her and said, well, let's talk about how you want to see a difference made. Do you want to put food in a belly today? Do you want to put food on a shelf so that somebody can have food in their belly tomorrow? Or do you want to work on the causes of hunger? And so even just helping people identify where in that, if you think of it as a river flowing, are you an upstream problem solver or are you pulling out people as they are floating downstream?
So talking to people and really customizing their personal strategy, whether that is really solutions oriented or if it's I want to just really be a bandaid, if you will. And I don't mean that in a negative way, but you've got to bandage the hurt right now before you can figure out what's causing that. And so I think working with the Community Foundation, working with a philanthropic advisor, can help people select the right cause, the right organization who has this philosophy that aligns with yours. Because there's a lot of organizations that, on the surface, seem identical. They're working towards the same population, but the way they approach the population or the problem might be a little bit different. And so we can kind of interpret that for them.
Kellams: Well, let me go back to the April event. Can we talk about that?
Ford: Absolutely.
Kellams: Is that public knowledge? Because it's pretty pretty cool.
Ford: Kind of cool. Yeah. April 16th, we are holding a summit in Little Rock. Arkansas Community Foundation has one of these about every 18 months or whenever we feel like the moment needs it. So in April, we are bringing together former Governor Asa Hutchinson and General Wesley Clark to have a fireside chat on civil discourse and civil leadership. We're going to bring in our volunteer board members from across the state, our staff. We're going to invite the media as well. We're going to have a fireside chat. It'll be moderated by “crazy” Craig O'Neal, which I think will be a lot of fun. But he has a long history with the Community Foundation, and he's a fantastic nonprofit advocate.
But bringing those two together to talk about in this moment where we are as a state and as a nation, how can we lead forward together and how can philanthropy help meet this moment that we're all in, whether it's through civil leadership or community leadership or giving or reaching across the aisle, getting to know each other better? I think it's going to be a great conversation, and I'm really looking forward to what they both have to say about civil discourse in Arkansas.
Kellams: You think about three million Arkansans, the chances that you've been touched by something that ACF has touched are very high.
Ford: That's a great point.
Kellams: I don't know if it's 100%, but I bet it's a very, very high percentage.
Ford: That's right. And during Covid we granted to all 75 counties. Um, we have like Jody mentioned–
Dilday: I can't keep up with that number
Ford: Because it keeps growing, thankfully, donors across the state. And like she said, you don't spend 60 million a year statewide every year on nonprofits without touching lives.
Kellams: What if someone's listening to this and wants to be part of it? What do they do?
Dilday: Pick up the phone or get online. Our website, arcf.org is an easy way to reach out to us. We have offices, like we said, in 29 locations all across the state. You can find your local affiliate at arcf.org. Or we're here in northwest Arkansas, we have a satellite office here. We have our central office in Little Rock, so give us a call.
Ford: I would say, always just call us. I heard you on the radio and I want to know more. I say all the time that Arkansas Community Foundation, we don't have an elevator spiel. We have an airplane ride. It takes that long. There is nothing simple about a community foundation. I would love to refine it down as best I could, but give us a call and let us talk to you about how you want to get involved and what you want to do.
Dilday: I really think that the way we approach things is we do a lot of the questions we ask, like you do. We ask them lots of questions because we want to offer the exactly perfect solution for them in terms of a charitable vehicle. So if I'm sitting down with somebody who wants to get involved, I want to know about their giving history. I want to know about what their timeline is for giving into the future. I want to know who all do they want to have involved, how involved do they want to be? And then I'm going to recommend one or two different types of funds to see which is the best fit for them.
Ford: I'm going to expand on that a little bit more. Don't give me a call to action because I will load it up with a response. If you're a nonprofit out there and you've never received a grant from the Community Foundation, give us a call because we might not know that you're out there, or you might have something in your 990 or your registration online that you're not showing up on our radar. And we want to know that you exist and we want to know what you're doing. So in the same website, Jody mentioned arcf.org. Reach out, call us, and we want to know who you are.
Jessica Hughes Ford is president and CEO of Arkansas Community Foundation. Jodi Dilday is vice president of Northwest operations. They were at the Carver Center for Public Radio last week. Today, ACF announced they are marking the organization’s 50th anniversary with more than $1 million in grants to Arkansas nonprofits.
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