The Nebraska Community Foundation serves 203 community, organizational and donor-advised affiliated funds in 183 communities located in 72 Nebraska counties. NCF and its affiliated funds have reinvested $96.6 million in Nebraska since 1993.
03/31/2009
Chairman McIntyre and Members of the Subcommittee, my name is Jeff Yost. I am President and CEO of the Nebraska Community Foundation. In addition to this testimony, I am supplying the Subcommittee with these two reports for the hearing record.
The Nebraska Community Foundation is a community development institution that uses philanthropy as a tool; we are not a charity. We are a decentralized system of 200 affiliated funds located in 71 of Nebraska’s 93 counties.
I get many requests from people across the nation who want to learn about the innovative nature of our work. Actually, what we are doing is overlaying a framework—one that has been used in countless urban neighborhoods—in our rural environment. It’s a bottoms-up approach that builds on community strengths by identifying local assets rather than focusing on deficiencies.
In struggling rural communities, local assets can be hard to find.
For decades, consolidation has destroyed the diversity of our rural economy. Out-migration of middle-class youth has crippled communities and shrunk the local tax base. The result is fewer career opportunities and severe underemployment.
Despite these trends, NCF has identified an enormous asset that our rural communities can build on. In land-rich, cash-poor Nebraska, that asset is the transfer of wealth. In 2002 we completed a county by county analysis of how much wealth will transfer from one generation to the next during the first half of this century.
We estimate that $94 billion will transfer in rural Nebraska alone; about $125,000 per person. More important is the timing: Because of our aging population, most rural counties are experiencing their peak years of transfer now or in the next three decades. If out-migration continues, most of that wealth will pass to heirs who no longer live where the wealth was built.
Our goal is ambitious. We ask our affiliated fund leaders to build permanent unrestricted community endowments equal to five percent of the projected 10-year transfer of wealth for their community. We coach these community leaders to send out a clear message to their family and friends. “When you plan for the future, consider your hometown as another child!”
Now in rural Nebraska, you don’t talk about how many acres somebody owns or how many cattle they have. So the thought of speaking directly to a potential benefactor about leaving a legacy gift is beyond imagination for most of our new affiliated fund leaders.
But they are learning.
Today 88 community-based funds have raised $38 million in endowed assets and planned gifts, most of it in the past five years. Over 2,000 local residents are leading these affiliated funds. Last year NCF and its affiliated funds received over 8,000 gifts. Forty-nine of these funds already have over $100,000 in endowed assets and planned gifts.
Capitalizing community endowments, however, is just a tool for achieving our ultimate goal, which is building communities where young people will choose to live, work and raise their families. Building endowments creates local funding streams to leverage the kind of community investments required to attract young families back to their rural roots.
This is a leap of faith for people who are used to giving their kids luggage for graduation.
Today, young people can choose to live and work wherever they want. What surprises many adults is that in surveys we’ve conducted with over 5,000 rural youth, more than half of the young people say they would prefer to return home to raise their families if career opportunities were available. More than 40 percent say they’re interested in taking an entrepreneurship class and owning their own business someday. Only 12 percent say that their community is “too small.”
We’re combining this youth optimism and the transfer of wealth opportunity to catalyze a development framework called Hometown Competitiveness, or HTC. HTC is an intensive community intervention based on four strategies we call “pillars.” They are:
Every community, no matter how small, has some level of potential in these four core capacities.
Because it is locally driven, HTC evolves differently in each of the 16 multi-community sites located in Nebraska, and in the 14 other states where HTC is underway. But similar impacts are occurring. More business expansions and transitions; more jobs created or retained; increasing diversity in new leadership; and more young people returning home.
The Nebraska Community Foundation and HTC are steeped in the principle that communities can only be built from the inside out. No outside expert, no one industry—no government program, for that matter, can sustain a community. It takes local leadership and locally-controlled assets to develop and move communities to prosperity.
The role of all external forces, including the federal government, is to provide technical assistance and flexible funding streams to empower local leaders to take advantage of these unprecedented opportunities.
Thank you. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
