Charity Reeves grew up in the shadow of the apple groves in Nebraska City, a daughter of the riverboat town nestled in the Missouri River basin.

She learned to read at Hayward Elementary, played house on the playground jungle gym, cruised the main street in high school and fed a love of writing with boxes of her future novels.

She graduated from Nebraska City High in 1992 and headed south to Peru State College, just 20 miles down the narrow asphalt ribbons of U.S. 75 and Nebraska 67.

But life and loans, love and work took Reeves in a different direction, and college got shoved somewhere behind the diaper pail and pureed peas.

Until two years ago, when a second baby and a tough pregnancy forced her to quit her job on a meat-processing assembly line.

When she ended up with a new job, as a special education aide at her old elementary school, working alongside those teachers who prompted and prodded her as a young girl.

When everything began to come into focus.

"I decided in my second year working here that this is really, really what I love," she said. "I should have followed my heart in the first place."

So the 29-year-old wife and mother of two decided that's what she would do.

And her hometown said, "Great, Charity, go for it" and handed her a $750 check to help her get there.

Reeves knew nothing about the Nebraska City Community Foundation, had no clue it was part of a bigger vision of the future for Nebraska's small towns.

She didn't realize her town's foundation had money to give, didn't know board members were looking for good uses for those dollars.

But they were, and they thought Charity Reeves was a good investment in the city's future.

Charitable giving certainly is not new; foundations and donations have helped build grand performing arts centers, child-friendly jungles and state-of-the-art research centers in the urban parts of this state.

But what about rural Nebraska? What about Shickley and Talmage, Utica and Wymore?

What about that mind-set that says to its rural Nebraska children: If you want to be successful, this small town with the grain elevator and seed-capped residents isn't the place to do it. Go forth and prosper. Somewhere else.

Ten years ago, a group of people, including a child of rural Nebraska who got elected lieutenant governor on a platform of rural economic development, had an idea.

Why not create a statewide community foundation, one aimed at rural Nebraska? Use it as a tool to teach those towns how to raise charitable dollars, to reinvest in themselves.

It differed from most urban community foundations that seek donations, then dole out money. This was a statewide organization teaching small towns the ropes of charitable giving, lending a hand but letting them call the shots.

And so the Nebraska Community Foundation was born, and in the past decade it gave away $35 million through its affiliated funds associated with 113 communities.

"I believe this process really fits the culture of Nebraska," said Maxine Moul, the former lieutenant governor and state economic development director who helped start the Nebraska Community Foundation in 1993. "It fits the pioneer spirit in this state that you help yourself, you don't depend on outside organizations."

The privately funded organization has eight full-time staff members and a board of directors from across the state.

It does the accounting for its affiliated foundations, organizations and donor-advised funds and facilitates for them the expensive and unwieldy process of getting charitable, tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service.

Just as important, it helps those communities plan how to create a pool of resources, offering leadership workshops and ideas.

Jeff Yost, president and CEO of the foundation, believes helping communities empowers them and gives residents a stake in their community.

"It all links back to feeding hope," he said. "We've created this whole cycle of not believing in the future of these places. In our small, little way, we're trying to reverse that kind of thinking."

And one success, he said, leads to others.

In David City, whose population has hovered around 2,500 since the late 1800s, the Thorpe Opera House is a beacon to the past.

To 1889, when W.B. Thorpe was flush with his latest fortune and decided to build his wife and daughter an opera house. It was the largest in the state and an alternative for the good citizens of David City who didn't want to patronize the saloon.

But time wore on the place, left it empty and unused. Until Beth Klosterman decided to make it a beacon for the future.

She bought it 26 years ago and, with help, fixed it up for school musicals and plays, community theater and wedding receptions.

Now she wants to really refurbish it, make use of those near-perfect acoustics, make it accessible to the disabled, fix the heating and air conditioning, put back the side balconies that once graced its walls.

So she enlisted the help of the Nebraska Community Foundation, which already had helped the longtime David City Area Community Foundation move forward.

"What we get above and beyond the management of the money is a lot of help and advice," said John Klosterman, chairman of the local foundation.

The foundation already has helped build a swimming pool, a ball field and a new library and has put new playground equipment in the park. That success gives residents the confidence to start their own projects and to give their money, he said.

Which is why Beth Klosterman is confident the Thorpe Opera House won't remain a relic of the past.

"We want to keep the historical integrity as much as we can," she said. "But it must be a functional, working building in this day and age. I have never wanted to keep it because it is an old building, but because it serves a purpose."

In the Nebraska Community Foundation, the future blows through the offices like wind through a wheat field.

Part of their goal is to raise money for specific projects, to build on the success, like that in David City.

The other is to tap into the existing wealth in these communities - and in those who grew up there.

A recent study by the foundation estimated $94 billion of personal wealth will change hands in rural Nebraska in the next 50 years. The foundation would like to see rural Nebraskans leave 5 percent of that to their hometowns.

Yost said that amount of money would change the framework in small towns from "what's wrong to what could happen."

Ron Parks of Papillion, chairman of the foundation, sees such endowed gifts as a different kind of economic development, more effective than the "smokestack chasing" philosophy of attracting new industry.

He was struck by it recently when he and his wife attended a meeting at which Valley County awarded $41,000 in grants, fruit of a $1.3 million bequest made four years earlier by an Ord couple.

As he and his wife strolled through the cemetery they found the couple's grave, a small marker in the grass.

"There was no big statue with pigeons pooping on it," he said. "The memorial was the $41,000 being given away nearby."

In Plattsmouth, the wooden caboose donated by Burlington Northern Railroad years ago, the one that sits on Main Street as a testament to the town's railcar-building past, will get a face-lift.

Residents thinking about starting their own businesses can take classes to help them get started.

The after-prom party, along with numerous other organizations, is now richer, and there's more money in the coffers of myriad community organizations.

Merle Atkinson, who came to Plattsmouth as a young woman to stay with her sister, is to thank for this $9,000 windfall.

Atkinson wasn't born in this Southeast Nebraska town but came to live with her sister as a young woman, worked in her beauty salon. She met her husband here, got married in her sister's home.

The couple moved on after they got married, to Montana and California. Then, in 1989, Atkinson, already widowed, moved home to be with her recently widowed sister.

Atkinson wasn't affluent, said her niece, Leola Williams, who lives in Salt Lake City. But she saved, invested wisely. And she liked the idea of giving back to the place she considered home.

"She was just that kind of person," said her sister, Gladys Hall.

So when the 91-year-old beautician died last year, the town got the $180,000 she'd left them in her will.

"It's a wonderful living memorial to her," Williams said. "There doesn't have to be a name attached to it or anything. It's just we know it's doing so much good for many, many people."

Jeanene Wehrbein, who was on the board of the Nebraska Community Foundation, wanted to put what she'd seen happen in other communities in motion in her own town, said gifts like Atkinson's are a good way to do it.

"I love this town. And I feel that there are a lot of old, traditional families, longtime families of this community that may have moved away, that might think about giving money to the community."

In Shickley, where it's nearly impossible not to know your neighbors, a new housing development greets those coming into town. The local foundation created years ago was in something of a rut.

From 1991 to 2001, the town's foundation handed out $9,000 in grants.

They were looking for more, so they met with Nebraska Community Foundation staff, who gave them some pointers, shared ideas, made suggestions. Among those was doing a legacy challenge, a program in which a community seeks a $100,000 grant and agrees to match it with local donations over three years.

The Shickley board made up a list of possible names and got on the phone. It took one call.

The Wilkins family, which owns Geneva State Bank and has a branch in Shickley, gave $105,000.

In the next 30 days, volunteers picked up telephones and got pledges worth $39,500.

Joe Kamler, Geneva State Bank vice president and treasurer of the local foundation, has all kinds of confidence in his town.

He was born and raised there, then landed a job at the bank after graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He doesn't see a small, dying town full of empty storefronts.

He's determined to keep his town alive, but even he was surprised by the speed with which they matched the first third of the grant.

"The numbers were kind of astounding," he said.

Four years ago, Brian Volkmer came home to rural Nebraska where he did much of his growing up, to his parents who live in Auburn, away from Ohio and a museum curator job that demanded too much.

"I was looking to come back to the Midwest, the plains," he said. "One of the reasons I moved out of Nebraska was there are not a lot of opportunities for museum (work)," he said.

Enter the Nebraska City Community Foundation, which wanted a way to consolidate its numerous small museums. With the help of the state foundation, they created a position for Volkmer as community museum curator.

It was a job with benefits and pay that could hold the expertise of a Nebraska boy who wanted to come home. Volkmer wanted the job, but didn't want to be paid like a new college graduate.

"I was very happy to do this job, but I wasn't going to eat macaroni and cheese anymore," he said.

Volkmer said the involvement of the state and local foundations made it happen.

"Really, without that tool, it would have been very difficult to create this," he said.

For another Nebraska City resident, the foundation's nontraditional scholarship was like a piece of a puzzle, part of fate moving her forward, to a college degree and a career.

"Everything just kind of fell into place," Reeves said. "Like it was all meant to be."

Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.

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