Banking & Finance  May 5, 2017

Community Foundation of Northern Colorado reaches $100M mark

FORT COLLINS — It all comes back to the Lincoln Center. Forty-two years ago, the city of Fort Collins was trying to convert the former junior high school at the corner of Magnolia and Mulberry Streets into a space for performance arts.

It just needed private funding, and to that end, the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado was born.

“It had a rather limited vision,” Ray Caraway, the foundation’s president for the last 14 years, said.

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The foundation initially had no staff, and like many of the thousands of similar community funds around the country, it started slowly. Community foundations are collections of numerous different charitable funds; they allow donors to create custom charities to fit how they want to help their community.

The community foundation in Kansas City has raised more than $1 billion; Denver’s is worth more than $600 million. Northern Colorado’s, though, languished for much of its existence; by 2003, it had raised only $14 million. No more.

This year, the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado cleared the $100 million mark. Caraway credits the exponential growth to two things.

The foundation started a “cornerstone campaign” in the early 2000s that raised $1.6 million for its own operating costs — hiring and paying staff and upgrading facilities and technology — an infusion of capital that it thought was necessary to help it bring in more donations.

“Having sufficient operating capital isn’t a guarantor of success, but not having it guarantees mediocrity,” Caraway said.

The other factor that has helped the fund grow, Caraway said, has been its willingness to accommodate donors, even when their contributions are unusual. The fund has accepted as gifts water rights, mineral rights, real estate, even an entire manufacturing firm with more than 40 employees.

“We have a can-do attitude, not to be irresponsible,” Caraway said. “But as long as we can liquidate it and turn it into a fund, we try very hard to say ‘yes.’”

One of the most recent donations it received, for example, was the Sky Corral Ranch, a dude ranch up Rist Canyon west of Fort Collins. Caraway said that the donor bought the ranch and wanted to do good with it, and so gave it to the foundation.

The foundation saw it as something that could be developed into a community retreat, and is in the process of investing several million dollars to renovate it. Right now, the foundation is making sure the ranch is up to the standards of Americans with Disabilities Act and is compliant with fire code. When finished, it’ll be a conference and retreat center that gives priority to schools, churches and non-profits.

And now that the foundation has raised more than $100 million, it expects growth to accelerate even more. Caraway compared it to the growth of for-profit businesses — “the bigger they are, the faster they grow” — and pointed to the Denver fund as an example. It’s raised more than $600 million, but 10 years ago had barely cleared $50 million. Funds such as Kansas City’s, in the multi-billions, have been around for nearly a century.

The Northern Colorado foundation has already seen that play out. It took 28 years to raise its first $14 million, but it hit $100 million only 14 years later. That is — and you’re reading this correctly — 614 percent growth in less than a decade and a half.

“It tends to have a snowball effect,” Caraway said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we reach $200 million within 10 years.”

 

FORT COLLINS — It all comes back to the Lincoln Center. Forty-two years ago, the city of Fort Collins was trying to convert the former junior high school at the corner of Magnolia and Mulberry Streets into a space for performance arts.

It just needed private funding, and to that end, the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado was born.

“It had a rather limited vision,” Ray Caraway, the foundation’s president for the last 14 years, said.

The foundation initially had no staff, and like many of the thousands of similar community funds around…

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