Bob Curran, President Elect of our club and President of the Foundation, gave us a quick update on the Foundation Board's work so far this year. A great deal of effort was put into updating the Foundation's processes; resulting in new procedures, revised bylaws, and publishing guidelines describing what we invest in for those applying for grants. The most important new procedure is assigning a club member to each organization we invest as a liaison. This helps us to stay abreast of their progress and needs. Our goal is to become more of a long term partner in delivering their service.
The Foundation has also been "marketing" itself to area non-profits as a way to identify new opportunities for us to assist the community.
We have invested $46,700 locally and $12,500 in international projects. The Foundation Board has 7 new applications to evaluate within the next few weeks so a decision can be made at the next board meeting. The only request denied so far was for body cameras to be used by local police. We limit our investment in municipal services to those extra items that are life saving, such as Narcan, bullet proof vests and Automated Defibrillators (AED's).
UPDATE AS OF MARCH 21, 2019
The split between local and international investments is currently 85%/15%. Essentially all requests going forward are epected to be for local investments, so this will probably end up as 95%/5% local/international.