Roby Brock: Welcome to today’s Northwest Arkansas Business Journal report. I’m your host, Roby Brock.
An Arkansas institution turns 50 years old and does something pretty big to celebrate. Jessica Ford, the new president and CEO of the Arkansas Community Foundation, joins me today to discuss one million new reasons it’s making an impact across the state.
Jessica Ford of the Arkansas Community Foundation is our guest on today’s Northwest Arkansas Business Journal report.
Brock:I’m joined now by Jessica Ford. She is the newly installed president and CEO of the Arkansas Community Foundation. Always good to see you, my friend. Congratulations.
Jessica Ford: Thank you. Excited to be here.
Brock: You should be excited. This is a big, big new shoes to fill. You’ve been there for a long time though, so people need to understand there’s some continuity at play here. For people who are not familiar with the Arkansas Community Foundation, why don’t you go ahead and just give us the 100,000-foot view of what that organization does?
Ford: Arkansas Community Foundation has been around for 50 years. As you mentioned, we are a statewide nonprofit public charity, and people come to us — philanthropists and nonprofits come to us — to invest their charitable dollars, and then we grant them out. So we’re the largest grant maker in the state by the number of grants that we make each year. And we do that statewide.
Brock: So give me kind of a walkthrough of — let’s just say I won the billion-dollar lottery, which I did not, but just in case, I’m hypothetical here — I come to you. How does that conversation start?
Ford: If you won the lottery, come to us. We’ll be happy to help you invest your charitable dollars. You don’t have to be a billionaire to be a philanthropist. We have 29 offices statewide where people come to us with $1,000 and say, help me give this away. So anyone who wants to make a difference with any amount of money can come to us. And we can say, what are your goals? Whether it’s a lasting legacy, whether you want to take action now, whether you have a specific cause in mind, we can help guide you. We use a lot of data to do that. We have a lot of intel on the ground with the nonprofit community, where we can help guide people to make a difference.
Brock: So 50 years, that’s a long time for an organization to be in existence.
Ford: Yeah.
Brock: What do you kind of attribute to navigating the tricky water? Not a lot of businesses make it 50 years.
Ford: Yeah, we’re really proud of that. We started with an idea that came from Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller and his right-hand woman, Mary McLeod. She was sort of paying attention to the philanthropic landscape nationwide. And community foundations were coming up as an idea in the ’60s and ’70s. And she said, Arkansas needs a community foundation. And she was right. So a group of people got together and formed Arkansas Community Foundation, which is where we are now.
And we’ve had our ups and downs like any organization. But I said in our press conference last week that Arkansas has a lot of challenges. We’re 50th on a lot of lists, but generosity isn’t one of those. We’re a really generous state, and we’re committed to taking care of each other. And I think that’s what’s sustained the organization for so long.
But also just relationships all over the state — rural and central and Northwest Arkansas. We’ve worked really hard at maintaining relationships and making sure that we steward charitable donors appropriately and that we give it away.
Brock: I think one of the biggest needles that you guys threaded was surviving COVID.
Ford: Yeah, absolutely.
Brock: Tell me a little bit about — you were there in the marketing role — tell me a little bit about navigating that hopefully once-in-a-lifetime series of events.
Ford: Yeah. I’m so glad you brought that up. When COVID hit, Gov. Asa Hutchinson at the time, who is also a fund holder with us, he endorsed us as the best place to give for pandemic relief. So within about eight weeks, we had raised about $3.7 million.
Brock: Wow.
Ford: That was such a great testament to how generous Arkansans were. Everybody wanted to help, but they weren’t sure how. And so they gave to us. And within about 12 weeks of that initial announcement, we had granted over half of that. And some organizations said, you were the first dollars. You were the first check I received during COVID, before the federal money came in, before the state funding came in. Doors open up. I don’t know if people remember the long lines at food pantries, but we were funding on the back end of all of that. We were the funders that were helping make that happen. So that was a great moment for the community foundation to be able to step up.
Brock: I mean, you say you saved money for a rainy day, and that was certainly a rainy day.
Ford: Yeah, that was more than a rainy day. It was worse than the weather we’re in right now.
Brock: Indeed. OK, so you guys gave a million dollars away on this 50th anniversary that you celebrated. Tell me what that million dollars went to. Where did the idea for that originate?
Ford: Right. Well, Heather Larkin was the CEO before me, and she was wonderful. I know you’ve had her on here. She was great. And so I inherited a very healthy organization thanks to Heather. But she had the foresight a couple of years ago to start tucking away some money, some reserves, so that we could give away a million dollars, because we don’t actually just have a million dollars sitting around to give away. A lot of that is donor-directed.
So we put a tic-tac-toe grid over the state of Arkansas and blocked it off into nine regions. And we looked at data — what are the top issues in those nine regions that need to be addressed? And it literally was across the map, from access to early child care to the trades to incarceration rates, addiction. And so we made grants to nonprofits in all nine of those regions that were addressing those specific causes in those regions.
So it was like 47 nonprofits.
Brock: Yeah. Three more, you’d have had 50 for —
Ford: I know, right? I should know my math wasn’t mathing on that. I could have done better with that one. But yeah, 47 nonprofits. We gave nine in those nine regions. We gave $50,000 to what we called legacy nonprofits — the ones that have been around for a long time and have a history of impact. And we gave $30,000 to what we called rising nonprofits, which were a little bit newer, a little more innovative approaches solving some new issues. And then our affiliate offices, which we have 29 of those statewide, we gave them each $10,000 and said, give to these causes, but you choose a local nonprofit in your area.
Brock: Well, the year is still alive for 50, so you can still find three more if you want to.
Ford: That’s true. I’ll keep working on that.
Brock: All right. In the time we have left, you’re the new CEO. Tell me what you are going to be doing that will be the same as what has been going on and what you might be doing differently in your role.
Ford: I think what I’ll be doing the same is that we’ll continue to steward our donor dollars appropriately. Probably one of our best assets is trust. And so we’ll continue to be prudent and to use data to make great decisions and to take care of our donor dollars.
But I think what the future holds is that we’re in an interesting time, and there’s so much demand on the nonprofit sector that we’re going to be making sure that where our donor dollars go is making the highest impact. So it means data-driven grantmaking and making sure that where there are real issues is where we’re directing our dollars. So I think that’s what you’ll see from me.
Brock: All right. Jessica Ford, she is the president and CEO of the Arkansas Community Foundation, also known as the pride of Redfield, Arkansas.
Ford: That’s right.
Brock: Thank you very much.
Ford: Yes. Awesome. Thanks.
Brock: I appreciate you so much. Best of luck. Please come back.
Ford: I will. Thank you.
That’s Jessica Ford, new president and CEO of the Arkansas Community Foundation. You can catch our full interview at NWABusinessJournal.com.
That’s all for this edition of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal report. I’m Roby Brock. We’ll see you next time.
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