Planting seeds for fertile future

As reported earlier this week by Ledger-Enquirer staff writer Alva James-Johnson, the Community Foundation of the Chattahoochee Valley has just presented more than $100,000 in discretionary grant funds to 16 area projects.

These projects, as James reported, dovetail with a Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce strategic plan for 2025 and beyond focused on broad “action areas” of culture, growth, education, community, identity, enterprise and like areas of human progress and interaction. Those categories are of course all interconnected and all vitally important.

But one dominant theme that stood out above all the others in the programs that were chosen for this round of Community Foundation discretionary funds was impossible to miss. At least half of the programs, and directly or indirectly almost all of them, involved education.

Check the list:

Boys & Girls Clubs of the Chattahoochee Valley’s “Read With Me” literacy program; a Partners in Education Readers program; a Girls Inc. STEM program, and a Muscogee County transportation program for students in need each received $10,000 grants.

Among the other projects chosen for funding were B.R.I.D.G.E. of Columbus for GED assistance; Ferst Foundation’s childhood literacy program, as well as a local early literacy program in Harris County; an Enrichment Services employment training scholarship program; and “When Learning Clicks” administered by the Springer Opera House.

Choosing programs most worthy of funding, out of what Community Foundation President and CEO Betsy Covington said were more than 60 applications, had to be a painstaking process involving, she said, “many hours to determine which projects most closely fit the criteria and funding priorities.”

But how many efforts to make a community better, more prosperous, more vibrant, more cohesive, more nurturing of talent or more connected are worthier of support than those enabling the most people in that community to achieve their potential?

On that subject …

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation established two University of Georgia need-based scholarship endowments last week, one for the UGA College of Pharmacy and one for students from Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods.

The Home Depot co-founder and Atlanta Falcons owner and his wife, Angela Blank, have given more than $300 million to charitable causes over the last two decades.

This latest fund addresses a specific need in Georgia: means-based scholarships to supplement the purely academic-based HOPE program in place since the early 1990s.

Few Georgians, even those of extraordinarily ample means, have the resources of an Arthur Blank. But as reported in the Athens Banner-Herald, UGA President Jere Morehead has set a goal of establishing up to 600 new need-based scholarships.

That’s a worthy project for every college and university in the state, and not every contribution has to be massive.

Denying agile minds access to higher education for no better reason than a lack of money represents a huge and unnecessary net loss for us all. A lot more $1.5 million gifts would be nice, but those smaller donations can add up to more diplomas than we might think.

This story was originally published October 5, 2017 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Planting seeds for fertile future."