The Dane G. Hansen Foundation has announced a commitment to infuse up to $150,000 in new funds in the next 12 months in each of the 26 counties in its service area. The funds will support immediate needs for local community grants and build or grow permanent funds for future community grants.
Pass-through grants
2017 is the third year the Hansen Foundation has offered counties funding for pass-through grants. The funding will be distributed in May and September. Local community foundation boards or grant review committees will make the decisions regarding how the dollars are spent in their counties.
The Hansen Foundation has already provided a total of $5.2 million in pass-through grants since 2015. An additional $2.6 million will be awarded this year.
The county-specific funds are administered in partnership with the Greater Northwest Kansas Community Foundation and the Greater Salina Community Foundation. Both of these partner foundations offer online grant applications to make the process easier for applicants.
Endowment Building Grants
The Hansen Foundation first offered matching dollars for county-specific endowments last March. Each county selected a particular month From April 2016 to April 2017 in which to host a matching-event or campaign for an unrestricted county-wide grant fund. The Hansen Foundation matched each donation dollar for dollar, up to $50,000 per county. Twenty-four of the 26 counties participated. Total donations Were more than $1.5 million dollars.
The Hansen Foundation awarded over a million dollars in matching funds, with one county still completing their campaign.
“The Trustees were very pleased with the response from most of our counties with regard to the endowment building initiative, and are eager to see how that continues to develop,” said Hansen Trustee Gary Poore.
“Ideally, each county will be developing a sustainable source of grant funding it can rely on for future county needs. We are basically helping them to replicate the model established by Mr. Hansen 51 years ago.”
Three counties in the Hansen service area, Decatur, Logan and Osborne, used the matching initiative to establish a community foundation.
“In addition to the fundraising success, the five communities in Osborne County collectively worked together, said Sarah LaRosh, of the newly established Osborne County Community Foundation. “This collective collaboration was refreshing and possibly more beneficial to Osborne County even than the funds raised.”
Strategic Doing Initiative
In addition to the funding announcements, the Hansen Foundation also announced a new initiative to help with county goal setting. The Foundation has contracted with Betty Johnson and Associates to facilitate the Strategic Doing process in each of the 26 counties that elects to participate.
The process will include broad representation from the county over a series of gatherings. Participants will work through three questions: what could we do to better our county; what should we do to better our county; and finally, what will we do to better our county?
The Hansen Foundation is eager to see where the individual counties and the region go with this goal-setting process. For counties that agree to fully participate, the Foundation will provide additional pass-through funding through the community foundations for up to four more years. These funds will help complete the projects identified in the Strategic Doing process.
The announcements of the additional dollars and the Strategic Doing initiative was revealed to community foundations last month in Hays at the Hansen Foundation’s Community Foundation Forum. More than 150 community foundation and economic development representatives from northwest Kansas attended.