Foundation Goals

1. Respond to Community Needs: Maintain and enhance the educational, social, cultural, health and civic resources of the community by supporting qualified nonprofit organizations. In accomplishing this goal, the board actively seeks input from citizens and donors in the form of information, suggestions, ideas and grant applications from a wide range of sources

2. Build the Foundation to secure the future of the WMVCF and ensure a predictable flow of money for grantmaking thus enabling donors’ funds to operate in perpetuity and permit grants for long-range projects.

3. Professionally Manage its permanent funds and distribute revenues and make distributions from donors’ charitable contributions and bequests in a manner consistent with donors’ specific and general interests;

4. Maintain a Representational Board consisting of a diverse group of citizens, which understands the broad needs of all parts of the community and strives to ensure that all segments of the community feel they have equal access to the foundation’s resources

5. Provide a Philanthropic Leadership Role in the Community by helping create and promote efforts among citizens to improve the quality of life in the community.

Purpose and Actions

  1. Provide Service to Donors:
    1. The WMVCF is an organization that donors can count on to operate without institutional bias.
    2. The WMVCF offers administrative structure for grantmaking, grantee assessment, grant monitoring and evaluation, and other tasks.
    3. The WMVCF provides donors with anonymity if desired and permits donors to avoid grant seekers while offering tax benefit for donated funds.
    4. The WMVCF will accept unrestricted funds for general community needs or advised funds which take into account the donor’s interest in a specific cause or donee.
    5. The WMVCF offers donors conservative, professional funds management.
  2. Make Grants
    1. The WMVCF practices pro-active grantmaking by assessing the community’s needs, how relatively critical are the needs, and what capacity already exists in the private, public and nonprofit sectors to meet the needs. Public input is solicited in determining community needs.
    2. The WMVCF balances priorities against its resources evaluating the type of funds available to it: unrestricted, field-of-interest, advised, or designated funds, program-related investments, or making its board and volunteers available.
    3. The WMVCF matches grantmaking procedures to priorities through competitive and unsolicited proposals as well as noncompetitive proposals requested by the board. Evaluation of grantees continues after grants are made.
  3. Provide Service to Nonprofits
    The WMVCF may provide seed money to enable nonprofit agencies to begin operations, initiates programs and finds nonprofit organizations to run them, manages endowments, and helps nonprofit agencies to improve their grant application skills.
  4. Provide Service to Other Grantmakers
    The WMVCF, through its status as a public charity, serves other grantmakers such as individuals, corporations and private foundations that are prohibited or restricted in making certain kinds of grants such as scholarships.
  5. Provide Leadership in the Community
    The WMVCF may urge all parties and partisan interests to rally behind ideas and programs that serve the public as a whole. Leadership may also be shown in putting foundation resources behind new and creative programs which improve the community.
  6. Communicate
    The WMVCF stays in contact with and educates all sectors of the community about the WMVCF including grantees and potential applicants, donors and their advisors, other community funders, business, government and neighborhood leaders, leaders of other foundations, advisory groups, task forces and commissions, educators and planners, policymakers, and the public.