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The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation has made the largest grant in its fifty-four-year history—$4.25 million to Piedmont Housing Alliance to purchase the former Red Carpet Inn on Premier Circle, off Route 29, in Albemarle County.

In this transformational project, Piedmont Housing will collaborate with several housing-centered nonprofit partners—including Virginia Supportive Housing, Thomas Jefferson Coalition for the Homeless, and PACEM—to operate the site as safe, non-congregate emergency shelter while it is redeveloped to create 80 permanent supportive housing apartments and approximately 60 additional affordable apartments. This grant is the first awarded by the Community Foundation’s new program, Investing for Local Impact, which uses creative financial tools to reimagine solutions to our most pressing problems.

A free online public event, April 15 from 12 to 1 p.m., will provide more information on the project and how community members can help. Register here.

“We’re excited to make a deeper impact on the historically intractable problem of homelessness,” Eboni Bugg, the Foundation’s director of programs, said. A 2012 Foundation grant to The Crossings at Fourth and Preston, also developed by Virginia Supportive Housing, helped to significantly cut the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness. Now, the Premier Circle redevelopment seeks to bring that number to zero.

“We have been listening to the community,” Bugg said. “And now we are partnering with area nonprofits to reimagine a hotel into a solution, one that puts the most vulnerable members of our community first.”

Bugg said the partnership evolved from a round of COVID-response grants. Traditional, close-quarter shelters were a health hazard. “The costs of maintaining people in hotel rooms was extremely expensive without providing a long-term solution,” she said. “So we kept talking with our nonprofit partners and realized that we had to invest in a different way.”

The grant, most of which comes from the Foundation’s Community Endowment, is “recoverable,” meaning as each phase of the project is completed, a portion of the funds will be returned to the Foundation in order to be reinvested in future projects. Toward that end, the final phase of the project includes developing the Route 29 frontage as a small subdivided portion of the site for future commercial use.

Housing is a fundamental human right, and its absence is a public-health crisis that negatively impacts all of us. “By standing with our neighbors most in need,” Brennan Gould, the Foundation’s president and CEO, said. “we create a region where everyone can thrive.”

Learn more: 12 Questions about the Collaboration to End Chronic Homelessness

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation is pleased to announce Ryan Jacoby as its new director of operations. Jacoby will oversee Foundation-wide administration, procedures, and project management, including communications, human resources, and database management.

“Ryan’s leadership, management experience, and passion for our region make him a perfect fit for this new position,” Brennan Gould, president and CEO of the Community Foundation, said. “He has deep ties to the nonprofit community and has been dedicated to helping to improve lives throughout our region. We’re excited to have him on our team.”

Since 2019, Jacoby has served as the deputy director of operations and advancement at Charlottesville’s Center for Nonprofit Excellence, where he also chaired the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Steering Committee. Prior to that, he was executive director of the PB&J Fund, a principal at Game Changer Consulting, and chief operating officer of Habitat for Humanity of Great Charlottesville.

“As someone long familiar with the work and impact of the Community Foundation,” Jacoby said, “I am thrilled to join the team and help leverage the passion and talents of our staff, Governing Board, and other key stakeholders. Together we’ll ensure that the Foundation’s work continues to empower everyone in our region and gives them the opportunity to thrive.”

A native of Atlanta, Jacoby earned a BS in sports medicine from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a master’s degree in environments and community from Antioch University in Seattle. When not working, he enjoys spending time with family, hiking, reading, spoiling his dogs, and watching professional soccer.

We’re sad to share that Diamond Walton has transitioned out of her role with the Community Foundation. Diamond joined our team in January 2020 as a programs manager. She helped to administer the Enriching Communities grant program and then, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, grant programs associated with the Community Emergency Response Fund. She and her teammates worked tirelessly on the Community Resource Helpline and later the Community Recovery & Catalyst Grants.

“Our community is so fortunate to have an organization like the Community Foundation, which works diligently not only to elevate community assets but also to help address systemic inequities,” Diamond said. “It has been a privilege to work with such a gifted and committed team.”

Diamond is now working with the Tipping Point Fund on impact investing to support philanthropists as they work to advance the impact-investing sector. We appreciate the invaluable ways she has contributed to the work of the Foundation during some of the most challenging times in our region. We celebrate her new opportunity and wish her the best of luck!

The last few weeks, not to mention the last year, have brought with them crisis and difficulty. We have experienced violence, terror, and loss of life. All the better to take this moment and give thanks to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., born on a rainy January day in 1929. Through his life and his words he constantly reminded us not only of our manifest imperfections as a nation but also the ideals we must always strive for:

A community and a country whose institutions do not divide or discriminate;
Where we invest in one another and where we all have the opportunity to thrive;
Where we seek to better understand our history and to learn from it;
Where we plan for the future with a generosity of spirit; and
Where we work together, pray together, and struggle together with the understanding that when one of us isn’t free, none of us are.

These ideals form the promissory note that Dr. King spoke of in his most famous speech. It’s a check he came to the capital to cash in 1963. That his dream has not yet been entirely realized should not stop us from making it ours.

We are pleased to welcome Murray Rodes as the Community Foundation’s interim director of finance. Rodes brings a wealth of local experience in accounting, financial management, and investment reporting, having worked with area nonprofits and foundations. He will work closely with Jan Dorman through the end of the year to ensure a smooth and successful transition in advance of Dorman’s retirement.

“We have been so fortunate to have Jan’s leadership and expertise since 2015,” Brennan Gould, the Community Foundation’s president and CEO, said. “We are pleased to have Murray on board now to cary forward the Foundation’s strong fiscal management and stewardship.”

Prior to joining the Community Foundation, Rodes served for five years as the finance manager for St. Anne’s–Belfield, a private school in Charlottesville. Before that he worked for the Blue Moon Fund and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Rodes earned a BA in business administration, magna cum laude, from Bridgewater College, in Bridgewater, Virginia, and an MBA from Virginia Tech.

“I am grateful for this opportunity to serve the Charlottesville community through this role at the Foundation,” Rodes said, “and I look forward to continuing its great success facilitating philanthropy to others.”

When he’s not working, Rodes enjoys spending time with his three daughters, hiking, visiting local breweries, and spending time with his wife, Emily. 

The Southeastern Council of Foundations (SECF), in partnership with the Truist Foundation, has presented the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation with an inaugural Truist Foundation Promise Award.

The award came in recognition of the Community Foundation’s “innovative response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to Janine Lee, president and CEO of SECF, “a response that leveraged multiple forms of philanthropic capital and provided [the] community with rapid support when it was most needed.”

The Community Foundation established its Community Emergency Response Fund on March 13, 2020, to address the immediate medical and economic needs created by the pandemic. In the beginning, $4.56 million went toward the Community Resource Helpline, providing direct aid to more than 5,000 households across the region, impacting an estimated 18,000 people. In addition, $847,000 funded grant awards to twenty-eight nonprofit organizations.

Over time the effort evolved into a broader, ongoing response to the longer-term challenges of the pandemic, which have often overlapped with issues of racial justice. In October, the Foundation awarded Community Recovery & Catalyst Grants to 124 area nonprofit organizations totaling $2,218,250.

Brennan Gould, president and CEO of the Community Foundation, thanked the more than 800 donors from throughout the region who made the response possible. The largest contributors included the Batten Family, Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band, the University of Virginia, Quad-C Management, Adiuvans Relief Fund, Wick and Bonnie Moorman, Hilltop Foundation, Quantitative Foundation, Pumpkin Seed Fund, Saraswati Fund, Wells Fargo, Tremaine Family Foundation, Bank of America Charitable Foundation, and three anonymous donors.

Community partners, including Cville Community Cares, the United Way of Greater Charlottesville, the City of Charlottesville, and Albemarle County, also were essential in the effort.

Gould stressed, however, that the work is not finished. “We are grateful for this recognition and to all of our donors and partners who made the work possible,” she said. “I’m also incredibly proud of our amazing team members who gave tirelessly to this effort. We know the pandemic is worse than ever and people are still suffering. This still remains a scary and challenging time for so many people. What’s most important is that we continue to find ways to meet the needs of our community in this difficult time.”

Based in Atlanta, the SECF is a membership association of more than 360 grantmakers working together to strengthen, promote, and increase philanthropy in 11 southeastern states, including Virginia. The Truist Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Truist, a bank formed out of the merger of BB&T and SunTrust.

City Schoolyard Garden, in partnership with Charlottesville City Schools, has been awarded a five-year, $500,000 Shaping Futures grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation. That group’s project is designed to improve the health of Charlottesville youth through healthy school meals, engagement in school gardens, and cultivating leadership and lifelong healthy living skills.

Meanwhile, the Birth Sisters of Charlottesville, a nonprofit organization whose trained doulas provide childbirth education, labor support, and postpartum care to women of color, continue work on their Shaping Futures grant—awarded in 2016 and the first such grant from the Community Foundation.

CITY SCHOOLYARD GARDEN RECEIVES SHAPING FUTURES GRANT

The Community Foundation established the Shaping Futures grant in partnership with the Martha Jefferson Hospital Foundation and with a generous annual gift from Dorothy Batten. The goal is to support programs that aim to improve outcomes for a population affected by a community-health trend.

Last year, City Schoolyard Garden (part of Cultivate Charlottesville), in partnership with Charlottesville City Schools, received the second-ever Shaping Futures grant for their Just Food for Charlottesville program. The grant is funded with help from the University of Virginia Health Systems and Dorothy Batten, and is designed to improve health outcomes identified in the MAPP2Health 2016–2019 Community Health Improvement Plan.

The Community Foundation sought proposals for projects scaled to produce population-level change for a specific demographic in such areas as healthy eating and active living, mental health and substance abuse, equity and accessibility, and the fostering of a healthy and connected community for all ages.

Just Food for Charlottesville was launched to improve food security and health outcomes for Charlottesville youth through increased access to and consumption of healthy school meals, engagement in school gardens, and cultivating leadership and lifelong healthy living skills.

While the COVID-19 crisis affected the program’s timeline, Cultivate Charlottesville helped bridge the service gap in the school-nutrition department during school closures. In collaboration with other community partners, Cultivate prepared meals to support Charlottesville City Schools students when the district was not providing meals, including spring break, Memorial Day, and Labor Day.

“We are excited to collaborate with Charlottesville City Schools in launching this grant that builds on goals defined by Food Justice Student Interns, parents, and community partners. Through amplifying youth voice and choice, increasing fresh, from scratch and local foods, building CCS infrastructure, and engaging students in nutrition and garden education, we aim to implement a meal program that builds equity and health for CCS students to thrive,” Jeanette Abi-Nader, the executive director of Cultivate Charlottesville, said.

“This project gives us the opportunity to build school infrastructure to increase from scratch and fresh-meal options while partnering with students to learn about what foods work for them,” Carlton Jones, the schools’ nutrition director, said.

BIRTH SISTERS FIRST SHAPING FUTURES RECIPIENT

In 2016, the Community Foundation awarded the first Shaping Futures grant to Birth Sisters of Charlottesville, then known as Sisters Keepers Doula Collective. The group seeks to address systemic racial disparities faced by Black women seeking maternal healthcare. At first the group received its grant funding through a fiscal sponsor but this year reorganized as a 501(c)(3) called Birth Sisters of Charlottesville. They have since leveraged an additional $150,000 from the Early Childhood Funders Network, a committee-advised fund at the Community Foundation.

The Early Childhood Funders Network was founded in 2017 to create a long-term, focused philanthropic response to the needs of young children and their families in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. “One of our goals has been to demonstrate the power of collective philanthropy,” the group said in a statement. “We are thrilled that six of our members have come together to support the critical and systems-changing work of Birth Sisters.”

“The grant highlights our commitment to addressing health disparities in the communities we serve.  The doulas are expert healthcare navigators, and their services continue to make significant differences in pregnancy outcomes for Black women in our community,” said Kimberly Skelly, the executive director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Foundation, co-funder of this Shaping Futures grant.

“We are grateful to the Community Foundation, Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, and the Early Childhood Funders Network for recognizing the need for radical change through their significant contribution supporting our mission,” the Birth Sisters said in a statement.

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation has awarded Community Recovery & Catalyst Grants to 124 area nonprofit organizations totaling $2,218,250. These grants are made possible through generous contributions from the Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band, the University of Virginia Health System, the Twice Is Nice Fund, Dorothy Batten, and Enriching Communities, which is managed by the Community Foundation. While these four grant programs typically hold independent grant rounds in the fall, this year they have combined into one effort to maximize resources dedicated to community recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic and to help address continued racial injustice. 

“The pandemic has had a significant impact on our nonprofit sector and has laid bare longstanding racial inequities in our communities,” Brennan Gould, president and CEO of the Community Foundation, said. “Out of a deep dedication to our region, these four grant programs provided all of their available grantmaking resources to this special grant round. The Bama Works Fund also gave an additional amount, for a total of $1 million, to make these grants possible.”

The Community Response & Catalyst Grants program was designed to help organizations recover, sustain, and build their services. Grants from this round will support organizations that are addressing topics such as mental health care, affordable housing, opportunity youth development and mentorship, accessible childcare, food insecurity, and racial equity in the arts.

“What we love about these projects is that they are about catalyzing change,” Gould said. “They look to the future not as a return to normalcy but as an opportunity to create something better for our community.” 

In addition, 182 area nonprofits were awarded subscriptions to a capacity-building organization called Catchafire. Catchafire connects organizations with talented professionals looking to give back, allowing them to access expertise in areas such as marketing, web development, operations, strategy, and more.

“We are really excited to partner with Catchafire to offer this unique opportunity. At the Foundation we know support beyond grantmaking is critical to driving the impact that we want to see in our region. We look forward to learning from this pilot program,” Eboni Bugg, the Community Foundation’s director of programs, said.

The grant round was the third major effort associated with the Foundation’s Community Emergency Response Fund, established on March 13, 2020, as a means of providing resources to households and organizations in Central Virginia impacted by the pandemic and subsequent economic crisis. An outpouring of generosity from large and small donors alike contributed more than $5.5 million in eight weeks. The Community Resource Helpline, operated in partnership with Cville Community Cares, United Way of Greater Charlottesville, the city of Charlottesville, and Albemarle County, disbursed $4.56 million in emergency financial aid to more than 5,000 households in Central Virginia. A special round of Rapid Response Grants distributed almost $900,000 to twenty-eight nonprofit organizations providing essential health and social services. 

After listening to the needs of the community and nonprofit organizations, the Foundation along with its funding partners, launched the Community Catalyst & Recovery Grant program in July. 

See a list of recipients. 

As Jim Beckett wryly noted, during our Investments Update webinar on October 13, “It’s been an interesting time.” So to check in our investments and look to the future, we gathered members of the Community Foundation’s Investment Committee and Wells Fargo Private Bank. Our panelists included Kristina Koutrakas, portfolio strategy director for the Virginia Retirement System; Alice Handy, founder and former CEO of Investure; Kristin Henningsen, managing director of CornerStone Partners; Frederick Nolde, director, Investure; and Beckett, an investment advisor at Wells Fargo.

“This webinar was a welcome opportunity to connect our fundholders with those who guide the investment practice of the Community Foundation,” Jan Dorman, director of finance, said, adding that the subsequent questions and suggestions from fundholders help shape policy. Watching a recording of the webinar and examine Beckett’s slides.

At the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, we believe that the history of our region does not lie in the past. Instead, it lives deep inside communities today, lending essential context to the successes we have enjoyed and the challenges we continue to face. And what context could be more essential than the recognition of peoples who came before us?

Governor Northam has declared today Indigenous Peoples Day, and we want to acknowledge that our offices and the wonderful region we serve are located on what originally was the land of the Monacan Indian Nation. The Monacan people were among several groups of Siouan-speaking Indians living here who were violently displaced by English invaders. Over several hundred years, they were the victims of war, disease, and enslavement. Many migrated or assimilated to European or African ways, some voluntarily and many others by force.

These indigenous nations struggled to maintain distinct identities and cultural traditions. The Racial Integrity Laws of the 1920s, in particular, sought to erase the identity of indigenous people And yet today, after a decades-long legal and political battle, the Monacan Indian Nation is state and federally recognized, its people proud custodians of their land and their heritage.

The quilt pictured above commemorates the return of seven-and-a-half acres of Monacan land to the tribe in 1995, land that is now the site of a museum and tribal center. This radio report explores Monacan history and culture, while this is a helpful and more general overview of indigenous people in Virginia.

It will never be enough to remember that Virginia Indians were once here; we must know that they are still here – still facing the challenges bequeathed from history, still battling the systems that marginalize them today, still bringing valued contributions to our communities.

Quilt by Pat McCauley; courtesy of the Monacan Indian Nation / Virginia Indian Archive