community foundations are different than other nonprofit foundations in that we take a collection of community or charitable funds that are established by individuals and other non profits in the community and we manage those funds on behalf of the entire community for instance we don't have a warehouse somewhere where we collect food and then provide that food for the homeless or we don't provide concerts in the park we make grants from these funds back to the community for a broader array of community needs a can be health care education even pet care one of the right community foundations most active funds is the bud his fund and from that fund we provide money throughout the puget sound area for seniors that are facing emergency veterinary bills and they might be faced with losing the only companion they have in the world and we're able to step in and and help them through that so so even though we don't provide the direct service we support the organizations of the community that do and we make a tremendous difference because of it lynn i think it's important that we mention the sam chess team fund that's where one of our funds we give money to the city of renton so low income families can take advantage of classes and summer camps it's a great fun and the fund it's really nice because sam was a long time director for the city parks department here in written and when he passed away his wife established the fund in his memory and so every year we give donations to the city  parks department to help the children and families who wouldn't otherwise be able to take advantage of some of those programs and so it's it's a really feel good kind of program and it's a memory of a great guy a community foundation is actually a collection of charitable funds that are established by individuals or other nonprofit agencies and then we we pool that money and we invest it and manage it for growth and stability and then we make grants back to the community to to benefit a broader array of community needs some people ask us why why would they give a community foundation a donation instead of just giving it directly to the organization that they have supported all along and i guess i would say to that the donors can and should give donations directly to the organizations they believe in but in reality there are many people in our communities who will donate thousands of dollars every year and feel that they haven't made an impact in the community and so if that's the case and they and they have the wherewithal to establish a fund i really would encourage them to talk to one of the twenty plus community foundations here in washington state about establishing a fund it's easy it's fast most of the community foundations will establish a fun from for as little as to ten thousand dollars we we operate locally so we are familiar with what's going on in the community we can help donors achieve their charitable dream and the donors can even reach in the right to recommend where those grants go and i'd use the example of state representative marcy backs well who has a fun with us in fact she's one of our founding board members and she just recently requested a out of over ten thousand dollars to help support bringing in a nationally acclaimed speaker on education which is one of her real passions in that personal come into the ikea performing arts center here in renton and be available to hundreds of people that will be able to take advantage of what he has to say we were very hard at the rent community foundation to be certain that we don't champion one cause over another we work on behalf of the entire community we try and level the playing field and the old saying goes the rising tide lifts all boats and we try to provide the rights and as an example of how are tied into the local community we work very closely with the rent school district in fact the superintendent sits on our board and we give money every year through both circle of giving and one of our funds the o j harper engineering children's needs fund it's a long title but we give money to the school specifically for to address means within individual classrooms and an example of that would be that we've given money to a couple of the high school classrooms for math calculators and the money with them purchases the calculators for low income students who can't afford to buy one and they can take it on loan and i can tell you that because my own daughter we had to buy one these these things run seventy or eighty dollars that's what they started they're very expensive and yet today the classrooms are requiring them when i went to school my calculator consisted of a piece of paper and a pencil so we we feel we're making a real difference in helping some of these students meet the scholastic needs of the classroom and and not be not be different than the other students quite often were asked how large is the written community foundation and what do we do with our funds we currently have over forty individual fund and they total them slightly over six million dollars we take those funds and we invest  with professionals our money is placed with the harris private bank of seattle firm and our goal is to not necessarily be the mark it but to retain our principle and to grow so as a result of that we have about sixty percent of our funds are in equities thirty five percent in fixed income and five percent in cash that is a conservative portfolio and what we found during the recent recession other large funds like ours lost thirty five percent of their value or more in some cases and our fund only dropped one hundred percent because we are conservative at the reading community foundation we try really hard to keep ministry of costs very low and we do accomplish that goal currently we charge between one and three percent in annual fee to the funds that we manage you know we're often asked what services we provide to the community since we don't provide a direct service and community foundations not only manage the charitable contributions but in our case the right and community foundations  case we we believe we help to solve problems we were recently about a year and a half ago we were asked by a group of concerned citizens that had come together in collaboration with the city to create the first off leash dog park in town and they started raising money they were having tremendous success with that but donors were asking for a tax deduction and they had not become a five a one c three nonprofit yet and didn't really want to and so they came to us and asked us if they could come in under our tax which we did allow them to do this stablish to fund within the community foundation and they were so successful frankly in getting in kind donations there are a lot of people in this community that love their dogs that they actually ended up with about seventeen to twenty thousand dollars left over in their fine and so now that money is being used for ongoing maintenance of the park and probably i guess it was at least once or twice we have made grants to them they are called renton's unleashed furry friends or rough we've made grants for what they call much mit so that when people use the dog park they can keep the dog park clean and were very very happy to have them as part of the right of community foundation there are providing a wonderful service for the community and for people who love their dogs even though the the goal of the red community foundation is to find individuals who have the wherewithal and the desire to set up individual charitable funds we also do accept small donations to those funds and many people in the community want to give what we call tribute gifts these are gifts in memory or an honor of somebody and they can go to our website and we've actually designed notifications colorful certificates almost that they can print out they make the donation to us they print out the certificate and then they can mail that to the person who they're giving the gift in honor of which is really nice you know frankly everybody already has enough blenders and and crockpots and organizations and it's something that we encourage people to think about when they're reviewing their wills or creating their wills bequests can make a tremendous difference to a nonprofit organization because it's something that we call planned giving it's when a donor actually plans in advance to make the gift in the gift is coming out of their assets as opposed to their current income and so when they when they plan for it and they put an organization into their will the money can either come as a percentage of the what's in the will they can put in a specific dollar amount or they it can be a remainder of whatever's left over in the will but the reality is that most times it will be a larger gift than if they had just written a check when the organization asked lynn could you talk a little more about some specific funds such as the germy given scholarship fund and the joy  for education and families well you know the one of the hallmarks of a community foundation is that community foundations can really help make people's charitable dream come true and people really do have charitable dreams they want to make a difference in the community and one person may believe strongly in one area while another person has a passion for a different area and a community foundation can work with both of them so the jeremy good law and fund is a perfect example of that jeremy was a young student at limburg high school a special needs student who graduated and went to rent technical college in the auto repair program and was killed in a street racing accident a few years ago his mother who received a number of donations in his memory took that money and created a fund here within the rent a community foundation and she wanted it specifically for special needs students because that's what your me was and she knew she works he happens to work in the school district that there are a lot of students like him that don't feel they have an opportunity to go to college or or they find it too difficult to apply for scholarships or that they would never get a scholarship and she wanted them to have a resource so it was it was something that she was passionate about and we were able to help her with that the joy  joy i was a long time elected school board member here in renton and worked at the school district for many years and when she retired recently her husband surprised her with the fund in her name the joy pot fun for education and families because that's what her passion is and i would actually use the randi rockhill fund as a final example randi was a long time band leader here or band instructor i guess at the re high school for about thirty years and just before he died he called me and asked me if i would come up to his home and he wanted to establish a fund which he named another long title the randall rock hill student instrumental music fund but the goal was very simple frankly and that was to help low income students in the school district who wanted to participate in the music program but maybe didn't have the money to either buy an instrument or rent the instrument or repair the instrument or maybe they wanted to go to band camp and they didn't have the money and randy had come across many of those students during his time at the school district and he wanted to see that they had an opportunity that maybe some of his other kids didn't have and we were able to create that fund and that fund actually has grown since his death so hopefully it will go on forever because their own community foundation doesn't have a discretionary fund at this point in  time when the foundation was first founded we wanted to be giving money away but didn't have it and so gary called us our president at the time came up with the idea of circle of giving where we would go out and actually raise the money a nd then give it back to the community in the form of grants in ten eleven years we've given out over three hundred thousand dollars through this program and about a year and a half ago a couple people came to us younger people in the community and said they would like to be involved in circle giving circle of giving us a thousand dollar donation and they couldn't afford a thousand dollar donation so how could they become involved and so we sat down with them and did some brainstorming and we came up with the idea of a different giving circle for younger professionals in the community and therefore the next curve was born we brought prince and megan prince on board with a whole group of young energetic people that have just launched this new idea in randy my name is the prince and i and the two thousand of them present for the next curve so how how did you come up with the next curve as a name or you know it's really interesting we went through various different iterations of names before we came up with the next curve i think we at one point were the need of extraordinary act of donors and then we stopped and we said what can we come what name can we use that would be uniquely renton and we thought about the fact that the city motto is ahead of the curve and we thought well why not be the next the next generation of donors and givers and you were in the city of winter becoming a member is very easy really all you have to do is come to one of our meetings say that you're interested and then we have two ways for you to donate what we ask people to do is a two hundred fifty dollars gift you can write a check that night or you can go online to the right between the foundation's web site  our website the next curve that org has a link to the community foundation's website and you can set up payment there you can either do the two hundred fifty all at once or you can break it out  payment monthly or quarterly that you'd like to do so tell us about the meetings you know we have two very different types of meetings and we did this because we want business where they can people can get to know each other and our other meeting on the opposite months are educational meetings we've had various established community and the leaders come in and talk to us on the importance of community involvement we always feature at least two nonprofits at our meeting so that they can let people know what their needs are and what they bring to the community and we have a really good time last year we had about thirty four members and we gave up gave out approximately sixty two hundred dollars we gave grants to variety of different non profits birthday dreams the evergreen city ballet written area youth and family services also known as a raise we were in close to being there in history museum the written rotary salvation army food needs in this economy basic needs you find more and more people who've never really had to go to a food bank or go to a close bank and those organizations are being stretched to the max so we really wanted to have a emphasis on basic needs while also making sure that we supported arts and culture as well well i wanted to explain a little bit about the similarity and dissimilarities between the circle of giving and the next curve the circle of giving is is very unique in that we go out and ask donors to donate one thousand dollars at a pop and then those donors are invited into a meeting at the end of the year where they actually recommend where the money goes in and as i said we've given out over three hundred thousand dollars in eleven years typically on an annual basis that's between thirty and forty thousand dollars the next curve is is just wonderfully unique in that these are younger up and coming professionals in the community because they're more tech savvy they will communicate more in facebook and through twitter they do they have the social meet ups where our circle of giving donors meet once a year and then they don't see each other again for another twelve months the next curve is meant to be a group that gets to know each other gets to to socialize with each other and learn about the community and then one of the their goals is that they hope to have many of their members actually join some of the nonprofit boards in the area so we really call this the next generation of community leaders i will say that when i first moved here five years ago one of the things i heard over and over from our local nonprofit organizations was that what they kept getting the same donors and the same board members it was the same people donating and volunteer and over and over again and frankly some of our board members are getting older and starting to fade out of the picture and so the next curve is is a great way to get new people involved and the younger generation who frankly have a tremendous amount  i i have and i know our board as well have a strong belief that giving is something that when it's practice it becomes a part of your life and not just financial giving but also giving of your time the more you get in the habit of doing it the more likely you are to do it and that was really one of our big goals for next curve along with trying to you know just build the next next generation of community leaders through education letting them learn about what's going on the community we want to teach them how to become actively engaged board members some of these folks some of our folks  never served on boards before and so we want them to we really want to take them and throughout the year give them a huge nice of what community life and written is and also introduce them to some non profits that they may not have heard of and some they have heard of and if there are opportunities where they're willing to serve that they're able to step into those roles and serve  of giving has grown tremendously over the years when we first started it eleven years ago we gave out i think it was eleven thousand dollars we've given as much as forty four thousand dollars out  each year we do an award ceremony where we actually hand the checks out to the receiving organizations and again in the beginning maybe twenty people showed up this last year we had close to two hundred people join us at the right and senior activity center for a really exciting and fun of van and this was the first year that we had the next curve with us when they gave out there are sixty two hundred fifty dollars and people were very excited not only because everybody was getting money but because we had we had launched this new effort in town to to bring new people into the the field of shared charitable giving and i think people were very excited about it with regard to the circle of giving i'd like to add a piece to that that process is really on the fast track the money is collected over a two month time period at the most in a month later the money is channeled out into the community and it goes to work right away the whole process from beginning to end is three months or less we have big goals in mind we manage six million dollars now but the goal is to double or triple that when we think about the future and the the types of resources that our communities are going to need if we had twenty thirty forty million dollars under management  i dream about the kinds of things that we could be doing in this community the kinds of problems that the that money could address and so we work very hard to find new donors  who might like to establish funds donors who want to contribute to the funds that we already have and truly make a difference in this community i think as we saw on this this most current recession  people's dollars you know their spendable dollars went down people lost their jobs their far on one case went down people stopped giving money to their favorite charities charitable donations went down and yet the reality is that for most of our nonprofits and town the request for services doubled and tripled there are more people going to the food banks there are more people that are homeless that need a place to stay and yet lean well the reality is that in the future that's going to happen again there i think the need for charitable giving is only going to grow and so our goal here at the rand community foundation is to grow the number of donors the number of people that care about their community not just now but in the future and will help us meet those ne