Over the last 68 years, the Benton Community Foundation has had our backs – offering support to nonprofits around town as well as giving scholarships to our young people as they head off to college.
The organization began life as the Benton County Foundation with two donations totaling $2,500. Today, they send hundreds of thousands of dollars into the county to support those who are houseless, hungry, or in need of support.
We sat down with Board of Directors Chair Susan Poole and President Chris Quaka to find out what good works they find themselves doing today.
TCA: Hi, I’m Sally Lehman and I’m with The Advocate. Today, we’re speaking to representatives of the Corvallis based nonprofit Benton Community Foundation, Susan Poole and Chris Quaka. Thank you for being here.
Susan Poole: Thanks for inviting us.
Chris Quaka: It’s a pleasure to be here.
TCA: So in 1953, your organization began life with two large donations from local vendors. By 2018, 65 years later, you had invested over $9 million into Benton County. How much have you invested as of today?
Quaka: Well, so as of today, we’ve eclipsed $12 million investment back in the community, in large part because of the donors who invested like those two donors did back in 1953, and our partnerships today with nonprofit leaders, other foundations, and in a great community of supporters that we’re surrounded
TCA: You call BCF a partner in philanthropy. Can you explain what that means?
Poole: Collaborations, strength of working together with nonprofits who are a long time established and newer, so they vary greatly in terms of their capacity. We are able to, through our mutual strengths and commitments, make them a better organization, and we might certainly benefit as well.
TCA: Which local charities use your specific services?
Quaka: Every year we support anywhere between 30 and 50 local nonprofits. So many of these nonprofits are focused on youth. The foundation was created to really create a brighter future for local youth. So that is an underlying theme in all of the work we do.
We support organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club, Community Outreach, Jackson Street Youth Shelter, and Old Mill Center. And all those organizations do different work with youth and have different programs that support youth, whether they’re experiencing houselessness, whether they have a developmental disability or are differently abled, whether they’re in need of childcare and a home as their family might be experiencing houselessness, or whether they’re in need of enrichment and learning more about the social interaction between each other.
And sometimes we get proposals from these organizations that will work with community volunteers to disburse this fund. Sometimes donors love these organizations and they come to us to help deliver funds after they’ve passed away or through an estate gift.
We really try to know what’s happening in the local community and we grow philanthropy here. Our role is really to try to be a catalyst for people to give back to the community. We really want to help people understand it’s all of our responsibility to give back in the way that we can, and we model that through our own personal giving and also the work of the foundation.
Poole: I would say further, in terms of the strength of collaboration, it’s not uncommon that nonprofits may be experiencing some of the same kinds of needs, or one may have developed some kind of strategy that would benefit another. And so through our mutual arrangement, we’re able to connect them.
And by the same token, we have donors who are interested in projects and programs that benefit children and they may not be aware of another program that has similar kinds of guidelines or needs. And so we’re able to give them some greater resources and give them other potential for their giving.
TCA: Do you administrate any groups outside of Benton County?
Quaka: We do – just a couple. And in fact, we’d love to grow outside of Benton County, [although] that’s historically where we’ve been. There is a community foundation in Brownsville – the Central Bank Community Foundation, who invests at BCF. And we partner with them in their projects. We offer whatever resources that we have as a community foundation to help them in their work of growing philanthropy in their community. And they’re a great organization.
We also fund nonprofits outside of the county that work within the Benton County area. So, a great example of that is ABC House in Albany, who do amazing work for kids locally in Benton County. So even though they might not have their main offices here, we understand that they’re serving people in this county and we want to support them.
And of course, we’re just talking about nonprofits. A big part of our work is scholarships for local students. So as you’re graduating, you can call the foundation. This year we offered 110 scholarships to 84 different students totaling more than a quarter million dollars investment in those youths’ future. And that money goes all over the country.
In fact, we sent some money for students to go to Canada. I think they like the maple syrup up there.
Then we work with donors who have interests across the country and have settled in Corvallis. And so they might want to support a nonprofit on the East Coast or in Florida, maybe where they lived their whole life and have connections to the community. They come to us because we’re local, and we can help them give the gifts across the country for them. So it’s a lot more than just locally, but that’s really our focus is making this local region better.
TCA: So you talk about trending issues a lot on your website presence. Have you made a lot of funds available to assist people through the COVID pandemic? And can you tell us about those efforts?
Poole: Excellent question. And I absolutely give Chris [Quaka] huge praise for really launching the COVID Response funds; that had enormous success. I think part of it was Chris’s background and experience with a disaster response. And so when COVID first came to our community and there were obvious needs by nonprofits and agencies, he was able to have a vision and brought it to the board and was able to act quickly.
Quaka: This was very exciting. And in fact, it all started because a community member called us up and asked for help. If you wonder if one person can make a difference, here is that story.
It was a nonprofit leader that we work with regularly. And she called up and said, ‘Here’s what’s happening. This is happening in the community, will the foundation help?’
And so after that 20 minute discussion, we started making calls to people we work with other nonprofit leaders, and within a week, we put together a COVID fund and a match program that we partnered with our local United Way of Linn, Benton, and Lincoln counties. So we partnered together on this match, collectively raising over $650,000 for Benton County specifically, in less than nine months. And so it was a tremendous effort.
To give you an idea, for those 68 years we’ve been in existence, we deliver about $800,000 a year. So we did that program last year. And on top of that, we added the COVID fund, which delivered another $443,000 from Benton Community Foundation, at no charge to those people that donated to us or the United Way.
We wanted the money to work in the community and we’re fortunate to have some stable funding at the foundation that we’re able to pivot and really focus on the community’s needs. We’re excited. We funded 30 organizations with those funds. They went to organizations providing individual assistance to people who had suffered job loss or couldn’t pay their rent or needed help, maybe with a car repaired to get to work.
We funded nonprofits who were feeding people, nonprofits who were housing people, whether as a result of them falling into houselessness from losing a home to COVID or the wildfires. We haven’t forgotten that the wildfires popped up in the middle of the pandemic season last year.
And so we are so thankful and fortunate to be in a community that did that level of support. It’s really the Board, Susan [Poole] gives us a lot of credit. I have a team that I’m fortunate to work with, but the Board with just a day’s notice.
And I remember as someone said, ‘Well, Chris, you’ve laid out a good plan. I don’t understand all of it, but we have confidence that our community will respond and we can do this.’
And we were fortunately in a place where we could really make a difference last year. We know that the need is still there. I was talking to one of the organizations that we funded just a few hours ago, the CASA organization – the Court Appointed Special Advocates – that got some of our larger gifts last fall. And we’re talking about the pandemic, the service they’re providing to the children, keeping their staff healthy. An organization that’s more than a business and cares for the people they’re serving. And that’s who we’re so fortunate to work with every day.
Poole: To pick up on Chris’s compliment. We do have an incredible Benton Community Foundation Board of Directors who are amazingly committed, active participants. And it’s not a Board to sit back and reflect, but rather really be doers and advocates.
And again, that $50,000 gift that launched the COVID Response Team that was a match and had such a multiplying effect so that individuals were able to receive money. And Benton Community Foundation has the capacity to promote these funds to other agencies, as Chris said, United Way and so forth, that then can give it to individuals where that’s not typically our mode of operation. We give it to individuals through scholarships, but typically we then give to agencies and other nonprofits.
TCA: So can you name any of the other charities local to Corvallis that you have given funds to? We have CASA, which is wonderful.
Quaka: So Boys and Girls Club, Old Mill – that’s a street shelter, Community Outreach, Stone Soup. We worked with Unity Shelter last year – the Corvallis Men’s Cold Weather Shelter. We also worked with the Room at the Inn – the women’s rescue shelter. We provided funding to Corvallis Public School District and the Corvallis Public Schools Foundation. ABC House. And there’s a couple dozen other ones that I couldn’t name off the top of my head. We Care [Corvallis] who helped, who’s been giving gifts to help individuals in need for decades, and we couldn’t do their work so we said, can we send you some help? You do more work on behalf of the foundation.
So it was those connections. And really, that’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to help nonprofits further their mission in the way they see is most appropriate and fit. So we provide the funding and grow the opportunities to give back. And we just want to empower them to make the change that they find is most suitable to their missions and what they’re trying to achieve. That’s really why we’re here.
Poole: Sally, I would very much encourage you and your readers and listeners to go to Benton Community Foundation website, look at our annual report. It has a lot of information that gives you not only who those agency partners are, but the amounts that they received and some of their stories that they have passed on to us.
TCA: I will. I’ll make sure we link to that. Thank you for the work that you’ve done, that you’re continuing to do through these difficult times. And thank you for your time today.
By Sally K Lehman
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