Cortes Island’s little community foundation has turned to be a leader in terms of innovation.
“Most community foundations have years and years of fundraising and millions of dollars of endowments behind them. They get to have their cake and eat it too,” explained Executive Director Manda Aufochs Gillespie.
“This idea that we’ve got – to just hit the ground running and figure out what the social profits on Cortes need and trying to help become a partner and getting that for them – turns out that’s really innovative in the community foundation world. It’s only the most up to date modern community foundations that are trying to figure that out.”
Mark Spevakow, Chair of the Cortes Island Community Foundation added: “We wanted to be effective now. Everyone is aware of how many challenges are here right in front of us.”
“If we had to wait until we were able to build up a big pool of funds, it would have to be really in the millions of dollars to be effective. Say we are able to eventually hit a place where there’s a couple million dollars in the bank, then we might be able to distribute $150,000 to the community. As a small community foundation and one that was just starting up, we don’t know when we will hit those types of numbers. It’s really about discussing with people and trying to get them to understand that by leaving money down the road to the community foundation, perhaps in their will, then it gives us an opportunity to keep building on this work that we’re doing.”
“We knew we couldn’t wait, so we’ve tried to figure out a way to be effective right off the get go. Part of that was by agreeing to get some funding in from people involved with the community foundation and a little bit from outside people and hire some staff to start to do all this work that we needed to do, we went from an organization that was waiting for its charitable status to come to really hitting the ground running.”
Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “We looked around and said on Cortes for things to happen when it comes to meeting the needs — whether it’s ecological needs or whether it’s, social justice needs, or whether it’s helping support the housing crisis on Cortes — all these things are met by nonprofits on Cortes.”
“We took over the seed grants from Cortes Literacy and turned them into microgrants. We have one of the largest microgrants for neighbours programs anywhere in BC even though we’re so little, and that is only small amounts of granting directly to individuals who are going to use it to do community good.”
“Then we also decided one of the things that we could do is just to be one of those partners that say Yes, when there’s a community group doing work that needs to be done and they need some sort of partner, whether that is a partner that maybe helps with fund development, or maybe that’s a partner that just provides a little bit of oversight. If they’re doing work in such a way that it fits our mission and that we feel like we have the capacity to support them, we have said, ‘Yes, we are going to help partner with you so that you can develop your organizational capacity, whether that’s developing into its own nonprofit, whether that’s helping to go for grants or whether that’s just helping to do this sort of fund development aspect, which means helping with the fundraising aspect of work.’”
Cortes Currents: The Cortes Foundation also played a key role in launching the Cortes Island Academy. I want to delve into this separately, but could you give us one of the headlines?
Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “The Cortes Island Academy is working on becoming its own nonprofit, but right now actually functions as a program of the Cortes Island Community Foundation.”
“That is within our mandate, which is almost everything that goes towards supporting Cortes and Cortes Islanders.”
“The third thing is we needed to figure out a way to get grants into our local community. How do you do that when you’re a community foundation with no money? That’s where we have been so fortunate to have board members who’ve been willing to do the work of staff and small nonprofits willing to get educated and be able to participate in these pilot programs.”
“So there’s been two pilot programs that we got to participate in recently, and I just want to point out that this is very unusual. The federal government only started passing money to the community foundations of Canada to go to smaller or more localized community foundations a few years ago.”
Aufochs Gillespie is referring to the two grants announced week. The Cortes Island Foundation has received a $40,000 grant to advance gender equality and $100,000 from the Community Services Recovery Fund.
Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “I think we’re looking at the fourth time ever with the recovery funds. This only just started happening and thank goodness it has started happening because it’s meant that we got to participate in this gender equity pilot program, which took a lot of volunteer time from our board in order to be chosen to participate because we were by far the smallest ever foundation to get chosen to participate in that pilot program. Because we had scrappy board members who were willing to sit in lieu of having a lot of staff that could go to all the education and training and everything else. This meant that we got to be one of the very few small community foundations who are chosen and able to participate in bringing money into the community.”
Mark Spevakow: “Thank goodness that we did the work that we did when we did it, because it’s allowed us to directly be available. As this kind of organization and really the only one that would’ve received these specific funds. We’re getting rewarded for being in the right place at the right time and all set up.”
Manda Aufochs Gillespie: “I’m really proud of the Cortes Island Community Foundation and the people directly involved because we didn’t think there was anything so special or different about being small, but also about being really mighty.”
Top photo credit: Running the race – Photo by Nicolas Hoizey on Unsplash
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