The Community Foundation for the Alleghenies is celebrating a big milestone of community support.
With the help of donors and community leaders, they reached over $100 million in assets.
Mike Kane, CFA’s President, said their achievement is a testament to the community.
“The way we grow assets and the way we invest them is designed to support the community every day, forever. We’ve grown $100 million in our region to do that. I just think it’s remarkable,”
CFA officials told the community about their milestone Wednesday during their annual Founder’s Day event at the Quemahoning Family Recreation Park.
CFA also announced they’ll be awarding over $1 million in new community and economic development grants.
“Sometimes in our region, we think there isn’t change or things don’t move quickly, but here’s something that really has,” Kane said.
The grant awards will be given to 22 organizations that involve recreation, scholarships, young people, art, blight eradication, and other local causes.
“There’s a vast array of things that this million dollars is funding. It’s all designed to advance our community. It’s all designed to make our community stronger,” Kane said.
The foundation has been serving Bedford, Cambria, Somerset, and Indiana counties for the past 31 years.
They’ve awarded over $15 million through grants and charitable distributions and currently operate 878 funds.
87 percent of their assets are endowed funds so, for example a scholarship can be awarded year after year, instead of just once.
“We invest this money, we get earnings, and then we redistribute it into the community. The larger the asset level goes, the more we can distribute, the more grants we can make, and the more initiatives we can help,”
Here’s how it works.
Let’s say you have an idea of how to make the community better, but you’re not sure where to start.
“People that have wanted to do scholarships, or support the arts, or support children, they come to us and say, here’s something we want to do, can you help?”
You can reach out to CFA, and they can help you navigate and manage your idea.
“We often think we don’t have resources here. What the community foundation, just like community foundations across the country, prove otherwise is that we can grow our local assets, we can care for our community, and care for its future,” Kane said.
CFA officials will do the “back office” work, including tax reporting and accounting.
Kane said they’ll help make their donors’ best wishes for our region a reality.
“We want to work with more and more donors, to support more and more, because we think that it’s the grassroots it’s us in our community that are going to decide what our community is going to be like. We think the community foundation is a good vehicle to help with that.”
