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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.

Read more.

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

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation is pleased to announce Brendan Wolfe as its new Marketing and Communications Manager. Wolfe, who started work on July 22, has been charged with advancing the Foundation’s mission and message to audiences in the Charlottesville area.

“We are thrilled that Brendan has joined our team,” says Brennan Gould, the Foundation’s president and CEO. “His first love is to tell stories and we are excited by the ways his skills will help the Foundation highlight the many compassionate and impactful ways that people are connecting with people throughout the region.”

Wolfe has spent more than twenty years as an editor, writer, and teacher, including almost twelve years at Virginia Humanities, where he edited Encyclopedia Virginia, an online encyclopedia of Virginia history. A native of Iowa, Wolfe has lived in Charlottesville since 2007.

“I just really love this community and the role that the Foundation plays in it,” he says. “Charlottesville’s history runs deep. What I love about the Foundation is that it is so committed to reaching out to the Charlottesville community, engaging that history, and using philanthropy to help make people’s lives better.”

In addition to having taught at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and WriterHouse, Wolfe is the author of two books, Finding Bix: The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend (2017) and Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope: A History of the University of Virginia in 100 Objects (2017).

At Virginia Humanities, Wolfe wrote a popular blog, hosted a podcast, and helped with the organization’s communications. Prior to that he worked in journalism and educational publishing.

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of its fifth round of Strengthening Systems grants. The Strengthening Systems grant awards up to $300,000 over three years to organizations that present a viable proposal to strengthen how services and activities are delivered and accessed in the community. This year’s grantees are The County of Albemarle and The Montpelier Foundation. 

The County of Albemarle: $300,000 
This grant will fund a full-time Program Coordinator for the Yancey School Community Center (YSCC), a significant and historical community hub, to successfully provide integrated service delivery from YSCC and ensure consistent and authentic engagement with the rural, Southern Albemarle community. Funds also support infrastructure for a community garden and programming to improve resident outcomes by focusing on increasing access to physical and mental health services. The overarching goal is to move the Yancey program services from an autonomous model to coordination of community services over the three-year period of the grant, and ultimately to full integration of services.

The Montpelier Foundation: $299,500
Initiated by Albemarle County Public School (ACPS) teachers, this grant will support teachers to partner with James Madison’s Montpelier to create a restructured social studies curriculum to improve the teaching and learning of “hard history” at ACPS. This system of learning will reimagine teacher and student engagement and offer historical context to address systemic racial inequities at ACPS. Participants will engage in professional development, curriculum design and implementation, and experiential learning resulting in improved content knowledge as well as attitudinal and behavioral changes among both teachers and students.

“We are inspired by these creative solutions to reimagine how our community systemically engages with our region’s history,” said Brennan Gould, President and CEO of the Community Foundation. “The Montpelier Foundation will model how a partnership between an exhibition and a school district can transform curriculum and student experiences. The County of Albemarle will create a community-based approach to redesign a critical, historical resource in a rural community. Both projects model how telling and preserving a more complete history can transform how services and activities are delivered and accessed in our community.”

The Community Foundation has awarded more than $2,000,000 through its Strengthening Systems grant track since the track was introduced in 2015. Based on the idea that communities are best served when systems work well and services and activities are available to all, these multi-year grants help improve the functioning of community systems and access to those systems. These grants are all made possible thanks to the generous support of donors and an annual contribution to the Foundation’s discretionary grantmaking from Dorothy Batten.

For more information about the Community Foundation, visit www.cacfonline.org. To inquire about the Strengthening Systems grant, email programs manager, Aiyana Marcus: amarcus@cacfonline.org. 

Central Virginia nonprofits can apply for grants to support community health initiatives through a partnership between the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and University of Virginia Health System.

The grants are available to nonprofits with the exception of UVA entities, with $250,000 available annually over the next five years. Three distinct grant opportunities will be available over the next six months. The first grant opportunity, Shaping Futures, is accepting proposals until July 1.

“The Community Foundation has received national recognition for their focus on equity. To that end, we can’t think of a better community partner to help us steward these resources towards programming that improves community health for all residents in the area. We are honored to partner and grateful for their willingness to support our efforts,” said Elizabeth Beasley, director of community relations for UVA Health System.

Supporting Community Health Priorities

The Community Foundation, on behalf of UVA Health System, is seeking proposals to improve the health of communities within Charlottesville and the counties of Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson.

Proposals for the Shaping Futures grant should seek to improve health outcomes identified in the MAPP2Health Community Health Improvement Plan, which includes:

• Promote healthy eating and active living: increase access to healthy foods and recreation through education, advocacy and evidence-based programming.
• Address mental health and substance use: improve capacity of culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health and substance abuse prevention and treatment services.
• Reduce health disparities and improve access to care: increase health equity through outreach and education to healthcare providers and community members.
• Foster a healthy and connected community for all ages: increase well-being by supporting education, prevention, advocacy and evidence-based programming.

“We are so pleased to embark on this journey with the University of Virginia Health System,” said Brennan Gould, Community Foundation President & CEO. “This partnership allows us to leverage our resources for broader impact on persistent health trends and disparities that are affecting our region.”

How To Apply

Applications for the Shaping Futures grant will be accepted until July 1 on the Community Foundation’s Website. Nonprofits that have previously received Community Foundation grants through the Shaping Futures or Strengthening Systems programs are eligible if their grant has concluded, all grant funds have been paid and the final report has been submitted and approved.