Seeing potential

Colorado’s foundations have a grand tradition of supporting causes that benefit people throughout the state.

More than a century of history can be traced through the formation of 1,700 foundations that collectively work to improve the quality of life for Coloradans. Three generations of the Boettcher family, for instance, once owned the iconic Brown Palace Hotel in Denver and amassed a fortune from such industries as cement. Their legacy, quite fittingly, is a foundation that supports capital-intensive projects such as the construction of a new seniors’ center in San Luis or the purchase of a Boys & Girls Club center in Brighton. One of the state’s earliest philanthropists, Spencer Penrose, built the historic Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs. A real estate and mining entrepreneur, Penrose and his wife, Julie, established El Pomar Foundation to strengthen communities throughout Colorado.

The mark these philanthropists leave extends beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars distributed each year through grants to nonprofit agencies. A project to end homelessness in Denver helps illustrate the ripple effect. Before Mayor John Hickenlooper launched his Denver’s Road Home plan in 2005, he secured support and expertise from local foundations in order to attract the participation he needed from business and government.

“The foundation community has played a key role,” Hickenlooper said of his plan to end homelessness within a decade. “Their leadership has been an absolutely essential ingredient.”

While foundations often provide funding and leadership that can make transformative programs possible, a recent survey showed most people can’t identify a single foundation by name. Even fewer can name a way a foundation has had an impact in their own community.

One challenge of telling the foundation story: Philanthropists have so many different goals and passions. The Gill Foundation and its Gay and Lesbian Fund work to support equality for all Coloradans. The Bonfils-Stanton Foundation strengthens the arts, promotes nonprofit leadership and invests in organizational management. The Temple Hoyne Buell Foundation specializes in early childhood education, while the Adolph Coors Foundation and the Helen K. and Arthur E. Johnson Foundation focus in part on community agencies that promote self-sufficiency among our state’s residents.

Because they can choose the areas they wish to fund, foundations ultimately support a broad array of causes. And new generations continue to create foundations. Over the years, breakthroughs in everything from the aluminum beer can to software to healthy dog food have allowed Coloradans to make a difference, not only as successful entrepreneurs but also as leaders in philanthropy.

Foundations and other types of funders come in various forms:

• The late cable TV pioneer, Bill Daniels, left his $1 billion estate to create the Daniels Fund, a private foundation providing grants and scholarships to those in need.
  
• Companies with household names – Qwest, Western Union and Xcel Energy – establish philanthropic arms to support communities where their customers live.
  
• When some of the state’s hospitals switched to for-profit status, they were required to use the proceeds from the transactions to create charitable foundations, such as Caring for Colorado Foundation.
  
• Through community foundations, such as The Denver Foundation, thousands of people of more modest means have been able to combine their money or set up donor-advised funds for the benefit of citizens served by nonprofits.
  
• Combined giving programs, such as Mile High United Way, also promote philanthropy at almost every income level.

This rich variety is seen as one of the sector’s greatest strengths. Foundations are pitching in with emergency funds in times of crisis, focusing on basic needs such as food and shelter, education and health care. Many help nonprofits initiate new projects or cover the costs of keeping the lights on, training staff or buying new computers.

Increasingly, foundations are coming together to make strategic investments designed to spur innovative ways to address challenges such as improving our children’s schools. They play the role of partner, investor, collaborator, catalyst. The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County, for example, is working to prevent the education achievement gap in local school districts by seeking a sustainable source of public funding for disadvantaged kids to attend preschool. The effort is modeled in part after the work of Denver’s private Piton Foundation, which funded a 2006 awareness campaign for a ballot initiative creating a preschool tuition credit.

The stories in this publication aim to help all of us better understand how foundations have been – and continue to be – a valuable resource throughout Colorado.