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Three new members have joined our Governing Board (from left to right): Antwon Brinson, Diane Schmidt, and Kristin L. Henningsen.

Brinson is the owner and CEO of Culinary Concepts AB, which was founded in 2018 and provides high-impact, motivational training in the food service industry. Prior to that he was the executive chef at Common House and cooked at restaurants and resorts around the country. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York.

Schmidt is Associate Head of School for Operations and CFO for St. Anne’s-Belfield, Inc. She is responsible for an annual budget of more than $20 million, runs the schools’ operations, maintaining grounds, and overseeing risk management. She received degrees from JMU and Mary Washington and is a graduate of Leadership Charlottesville.

Henningsen is the Managing Director of the operations division of CornerStone Partners, an Outsourced CIO firm in Charlottesville. CornerStone manages about $11 billion in assets for fourteen not-for-profit clients. Prior to joining CornerStone, she worked for a large regional accounting firm and an investment banking firm.

Welcome!

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation is pleased to announce Andrew Zapanta as its new Financial Controller, effective February 10, 2020. Zapanta will manage the Foundation’s accounting operations and internal controls and handle expenditures, auditing processes, statements, data analysis, and compliance.

“I’m delighted to have Andrew joining the Foundation staff and especially the finance and administration team,” Jan Dorman, Director of Finance, said. “With Andrew’s experience and expertise, I anticipate improved efficiencies to better support our donors, fundholders, and grantees.”

Zapanta has more than twenty years of experience in public, corporate, and nonprofit accounting, as well as tax and internal auditing. Most recently. he served as a financial analyst for the University of Virginia Medical Center.

“I sincerely believe in giving back to the community through any or all the skills you have,” Zapanta said. “The Foundation has a unique role in enabling organizations to fulfill their calling through its grantmaking. It’s an honor to be part of the Community Foundation family.”

A native of Harrisonburg and a longtime resident of Charlottesville, Zapanta has a bachelor of science in accounting from Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech. He served as both a financial analyst and an internal auditor for the University of Virginia Physicians Group for seventeen years. In addition, Zapanta has volunteered his professional skills to nonprofit organizations, serving locally and in Honduras, Haiti, and Kenya.  

Zapanta is an avid runner and has completed marathons nationwide. Often he combines his love for running and travel with photography, and his work has been featured in art shows and media publications. He and his wife, Heidi, live in Charlottesville.

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation is pleased to announce that on January 6 Diamond Walton began work as our new Programs Manager. Reporting to Eboni Bugg, the Director of Programs, she will administer the Foundation’s Enriching Communities grant program and serve as the primary point of contact for grant-seeking community partners, including nonprofits, government organizations, and individuals who are working to improve the quality of life in the Charlottesville area.

“We are extremely fortunate that Diamond will be joining the Foundation as a Programs Manager,” Bugg said. “She brings a fresh perspective on our work and her interests and skills align with our values, priorities, and strategies. With experience studying social correlates of health and supporting our rural communities with MAPP2Health Implementation Grants, Diamond understands the way critical issues intersect and how philanthropy can be a driving force for change.”

Walton has spent her career pursuing community-led solutions to public health issues. Her work has involved coalition building, strategic planning, program development and evaluation, and grant writing. She has worked alongside community members to mobilize financial, social, and human capital to address social determinants of health, such as transportation, the built environment, access to health care, and socioeconomic status.

“I look forward to continuing my service to our community as a Programs Manager,” Walton said. “I am excited to hear from community members and support them as they work toward their visions for the future. It’s an honor to join such an accomplished and innovative team and organization.”

Walton holds a BA from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in public health from Emory University. She has worked internationally as a Peace Corps volunteer, nationally as a government contractor promoting the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services to improve health care quality, and locally in the health system and academia to improve population health outcomes.

Most recently she provided technical assistance to organizations that apply for and receive MAPP2Health Core Group Implementation grants and the University of Virginia Community Health Grant. Walton has been a Charlottesville resident for nine years and in her free time can be found on the playground with her husband Nathan and their two daughters, Esperanza and Vera.

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation announces $655,000 in grants to 83 local nonprofits through the Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band. With its most recent round of grants, the Bama Works Fund again provides support to organizations that work to address issues related to children, education, arts and culture, vulnerable populations, and the environment.

Established in 1998, the Bama Works Fund has made grants in Charlottesville and the seven surrounding counties for two decades, creating a significant impact on hundreds of organizations in the area. Since 1998, the Fund has made more than 2,000 grants, totaling more than $22 million.

The Fund supported a wide range of efforts this cycle, including Creciendo Juntos, a Latinx leadership- building organization in Charlottesville; Shady Grove Rosenwald School, in Louisa County, the site of a one-room African American school in 1924–1925; and the Youth Development Council of Greene County, which provides after-school and summer programs for children. For a full list of grant recipients, click here.

Dave Matthews Band’s philanthropy through the Bama Works Fund has not only touched a broad range of nonprofits of all sizes; the band gives back to the community in other ways. In September 2017, for instance, Dave Matthews Band headlined the Concert for Charlottesville in response to the white supremacist-led violence that took place the month before.

“The Charlottesville area has seen and felt the impact of the Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band through their generous grantmaking for more than two decades,” Brennan Gould, President and CEO of the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, said. “We are extremely grateful to partner on such a meaningful source of support to improve the quality of life in our region.”

Twice each year, the Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band at the Community Foundation awards gifts through a competitive grant cycle. The next deadline for applicants seeking a grant is February 1, 2020. Additional information on the grant process can be found here.

Katie Kling has been named the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation’s new Director of Advancement. She had served as Donor Services Manager since July 2018, a position that made her the chief point of contact between more than 300 donors and the Foundation.

“My goal has always been to make sure our fundholders have whatever they need to understand how best to serve our region with their philanthropy,” Kling said. As Director of Advancement, she will oversee continued high-quality, customized donor service at the Foundation. She will also manage two yet-to-be-hired Donors Services Managers.

President and CEO Brennan Gould said, “Without exception, our donors raved about her ability to listen and to assist their philanthropy in ways that were meaningful and advanced important community work.”

Prior to coming to the Foundation, Katie worked for Aspire Public Schools, a nonprofit charter-school management company that ran public schools in California and Memphis, Tennessee. She worked as a teacher, instructional coach, and Director of Education during her tenure there. Before that, she worked in business development in the financial services industry.   

The Foundation is recruiting two Donor Relations Managers. Visit our careers page for more information about these opportunities.

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation has received a $50,000 grant from Northrop Grumman Corporation, a global security company with offices in Charlottesville. The company made the gift in recognition of the Foundation’s leadership after the violence of August 2017, and the funds will support racial equity work at the Foundation.

“We’re so grateful to have Northrop Grumman as a partner in this important work,” Brennan Gould, the Foundation’s president and CEO, said.

Established in 1967, the Community Foundation serves Charlottesville and the surrounding counties of Albemarle, Greene, Louisa, Orange, Fluvanna, Nelson, and Buckingham. The Foundation supports nonprofit organizations in fostering a vibrant and thriving region.

“The people who established the Community Foundation had a vision of a lasting resource dedicated to the region and rooted in the belief that we are all interconnected,” Gould said. “In order to thrive together, we have to value and invest in one another. We’re grateful to Northrop Grumman for their crucial support. It’s a gift not just to our organization but to the whole community.”

David Dodson delivered the keynote address at this year’s Annual Lunch on October 10. Calling his talk “Building a Loom to Weave the Future,” Dodson shared with our attending donors and nonprofit partners “some thoughts about where we are [and] where we are going,” while seeking “to root the Charlottesville region in the larger narrative of possibilities and challenges that we face in the South.”

Dodson, president of MDC, a nonprofit based in Durham, North Carolina, commented from the podium on the warmth and conviviality in the room. There is no question that the Annual Lunch gives us an opportunity to connect with all of our stakeholders, and for our stakeholders to connect with each other. It’s a connection we deeply value. “When I look out at this room,” Foundation President Brennan Gould told the group in her introduction, “I see a community of people who believe what our founding members believed—that we are deeply interconnected.”

Watch Dodson’s complete presentation here, including Gould’s introduction. You’ll also find a link to MDC’s most recent State of the South report.

On September 26, the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation invited four nonprofit leaders to talk to donors about their work and its impact. Their wide-ranging conversation, moderated by Katie Kling, the Foundation’s Donor Engagement Manager, suggests how varied and critical is the work of local nonprofits.

Tamara Wilkerson spoke about the African American Teaching Fellows (AATF) and Randy Rodgers represented the Jefferson Area Board for Aging (JABA). Jessica Harris described Empowered Players, a group in Fluvanna County, while Michael Reilly talked about Virginia Foodshed Capital.

All four groups have received Enriching Communities grants from the Foundation.

According to Wilkerson, AATF seeks to recruit, support, develop, and retain black teachers in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. She emphasized how important it was for black students to see teachers who looked like them, but also how critical it was for teachers to have a support system. When she began teaching, she was one of only two African American Spanish teachers in the region.

“When I faced difficult issues in the workplace,” she said, “AATF was the space for me that kept me from quitting my job.”

Rodgers administers JABA’s insurance counseling program, which helps seniors navigate the complications of Medicare and Medicaid. He spoke of one woman who, had she not changed her prescription program, would have been priced out of life-saving drugs. “Growing older in our society is hard,” he said. “So we try to give any help that we can.”

Harris grew up in Fluvanna County, where there were not many opportunities for kids interested in the arts. She founded Empowered Players to fix that—with theater classes, mentoring opportunities, and performances the whole community can attend. “With theater and arts it’s hard to quantify impact,” she explained. “It’s something that you just feel, and something that you see students experience very directly. It’s a student who says, ‘I didn’t know I could do this, but now I know that theater is for everyone.’”

Reilly’s group provides no-interest loans to small and mid-sized organic farms in the area. “Our loan program solves a big problem for local farms,” he said. “Low-income families running these farms are just simply shut out from the traditional financial system.” His group helps them grow and expand, like any other business.

“We’re just thrilled to be serving our communities,” Harris said. It was a sentiment shared by everyone on the stage.

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(Photo by Jesus Pino. From left to right: Katie Kling, Tamara Wilkerson, Randy Rodgers, Jessica Harris, and Michael Reilly.)