Spotlight on giving in Georgia

People familiar with the work of the Community Foundation of the Chattahoochee Valley have likely heard its president, Betsy Covington, use a favorite phrase — “raging philanthropists,” that corps of givers whose generosity betters the places where they live and work.

It’s a term she uses in a recent article in Georgia Trend magazine that reports on the work of such organizations around the state, and how they use the gifts — material and otherwise — of their contributors and volunteers to address area needs and visions for progress.

Georgia is a large state, and it is both a geographically and demographically diverse one.

“Just as varied,” writes author Jennifer Hafer in the magazine’s August edition, “are the needs of communities in different regions of the state and those who wish to make their communities better places.”

There are, according to the Trend piece, more than 750 community foundations in the United States, 13 of them in Georgia. The largest of the latter, not surprisingly, is the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, which ranks as the 18th largest in the nation.

“We have a healthy statewide network,” Covington said by phone Tuesday. “It’s not an official network, but we talk to each other; we help each other out.”

A key part of a community foundation’s mission — aside from the obvious one of providing help and funding projects for people and communities in need of them — is “helping [donors] be strategic and knowledgeable about the community and specific nonprofits,” Alicia Philipp, the Atlanta foundation’s president, told Georgia Trend.

Obviously, the needs of metro Atlanta differ from those in coastal Georgia, or the north Georgia mountains, or the Chattahoochee Valley, though of course there are always the areas of overlap.

For instance, the Community Foundation of Northwest Georgia was faced with critical hunger issues when the recession hit that region particularly hard. Many of its projects have been focused on that area — but also, as its president told the magazine, on such varied projects as a homeless shelter, a radiation therapy center at an area hospital and a wilderness park.

A recurring theme in the Georgia Trend piece is the role of these foundations not only (or even primarily) in responding to needs as they appear, but in anticipating how their communities can be made better in the years ahead.

A community foundation is “an incubator of progressive civic thought,” Mayor Teresa Tomlinson told Georgia Trend. (She and husband Trip made an initial contribution of $250,000 13 years ago.) “Then it has the ability to arrange the partnerships that turn that thought into action.”

A project Covington talks about in the article is the Friends of the Greenway Trail Fund, a drive to create a 27-mile RiverLink Greenway Trail through Muscogee County.

Community foundations, here and elsewhere, are “good tools for helping people build communities,” Covington said Tuesday. Georgia Trend tells an encouraging story of such community building going on statewide.

This story was originally published August 9, 2016 at 4:43 PM with the headline "Spotlight on giving in Georgia."