What’s next for Community Foundations?
Catherine Brown, Director, Catherine Brown & Associates
Community Foundations have come a long way in the seven years since The Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR) made its first grants to rural and regional community foundations. In 2000 there were only two community owned and managed Community Foundations in Australia - Melbourne and Tasmania. Geelong was in the process of incorporation. Today there are more than twenty–five community foundations responding to the needs of local communities as diverse as Buderim (QLD) and Mount Gambier (SA).Some community foundations cover a huge territory, for example the Western Australian Community Foundation, and respond to small communities through local trusts and donation accounts. Others such as Tumut and Wingecarribee, while operating in small communities, have become powerful leaders in their communities and have acted as catalysts for social planning projects, brining in new philanthropic funds and engaging with local businesses keen to grow their corporate community involvement. Funds range< from $35 million to $200,000 for more established foundations, including flow through funds. From small seeds, big things grow.Why have community foundations captured the imagination and energy of so many Australian communities, despite some real challenges?The answers are varied:
- The first is a genuine desire for communities to help themselves and to build financial and social capital to respond to their own challenges in new ways.
- The second is the need to prevent charitable funds leaving a community, particularly in rural areas.
- Another reason is the desire of donors to give back to their own community. A community foundation is the perfect vehicle for this, especially if the donor wants to support longer term projects.
- Next are the opportunities provided by community foundations to leverage other funding and to build new alliances within communities.
Community foundations are achieving these outcomes. Some are more focused on building their funds and others are more focused on small grantmaking and community building projects. Both areas are important roles for community foundations and the community foundation movement in Australia can comfortably cover both approaches. In time, I expect that all community foundations will be both major grant makers and community leaders, taking on projects which advance their communities understanding of social or environmental challenges and how to tackle them.A positive step forward has been the amendment to the Income Tax Assessment Act (which came into effect on 1 July 2007) which allows FRRR to work in partnership with rural and regional community foundations to improve the tax effectiveness of donations and the effectiveness of grantmaking.Within five years, I would like to see:
- A commitment from Government to support community philanthropy by providing both further incentives for donors and support for organisational development. Recent Government initiatives have largely supported private and corporate philanthropy;
- All Australians knowing about community foundations and what they do;
- A continued building of the capacity of community foundations as grant makers and catalysts and convenors within their communities;
- Community foundations ready with enough independent assets to respond quickly in times of crisis (such as the New York Community Trust following September 11) and to make some really interesting longer term investments in their communities.
- More private and corporate foundations and government programs working in partnership with community foundations to deliver benefits for local communities.
- Community foundations working together to achieve these next steps. The sky is really the limit for community foundations in Australia!