SRQ Daily Columnist Teri A Hansen is president and CEO of Gulf Coast Community Foundation.

A century ago, a wise Clevelander put forth a brilliant idea. What if someone making a will could turn to a permanent organization, he asked, and say, “I want to leave [a sum of money] to be used for the good of the community, but I have no way of knowing what will be the greatest need 50 years from now. Therefore, I place it in your hands to determine what should be done.”

That idea became the world’s first community foundation, the Cleveland Foundation. Up until then, philanthropy had been the province of industry titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller, who (admirably) channeled their great wealth into private foundations for philanthropic purposes. But this revolutionary concept of a community foundation could attract and organize the aspirations and resources of many different people, across a community, to advance its betterment. It effectively opened up philanthropy to people of all levels of wealth.

Gulf Coast Community Foundation is, in a sense, a great-great grandchild of that original place-based foundation. We stem from the tradition and honor the legacy of our forerunners. But at just over 19 ourselves, we also strive to innovate, leverage technology and push the outer edges of the envelope to redefine the role of a community foundation and potential of philanthropy. We also have a contemporary appreciation that “communities” can form around much more than just geography.

Gulf Coast has its own founding story. The concept of a community caring for its own took shape in 1951, when local citizens pooled time, effort and money to create a community hospital in Venice. The same spirit guided the decision decades later to sell the hospital and use the proceeds to create a community foundation.

That money could have been spent quickly, funding a flurry of agencies and programs in a feel-good community windfall. But the prudent wisdom in the decision to create a permanently endowed resource for the region is borne out by the numbers. Since being seeded in 1995 with about $92 million, Gulf Coast has invested over $177 million (almost double) back into the community through grants to nonprofits, regional-improvement initiatives, scholarships and more. Meanwhile, Gulf Coast’s assets today stand at $274 million, having grown through the stewardship of our board and the pooling of additional funds by hundreds of families, individuals, organizations and businesses that believe in the model of a community foundation.

More meaningful than cumulative dollars, however, are the improvements, innovations and transformations made possible through the unique collaboration that is a community foundation. Things like:

• A statewide change to 911 law that stemmed from a policy report we commissioned after a local woman lost her life when our public-safety system failed her.
• An education partnership that has transformed the way teachers teach and students learn science and math in local schools, even giving our region a competitive advantage touted by economic development officials.
• A permanent memorial fund to be used for the good of North Port because we helped a generous woman structure a gift to benefit the community and neighbors she loved, not only today, but 50, 100, and many more years from now.

As leaders of the now 750-plus community foundations across the country gather this month in Cleveland, ostensibly to celebrate the centennial of community philanthropy, the real work will be imagining the next century. We don’t know what the greatest needs will be 50 years from now, let alone 100. But with the permanence, flexibility and foresight of a foundation for the entire community, we can count on the power of endowed philanthropy—and the generous philanthropists who fuel it—to be ready.

SRQ Daily Columnist Teri A Hansen is president and CEO of Gulf Coast Community Foundation.