Originally published on 10/11’s Pure Nebraska program.
Members of the Wayne Area Legacy Fund are working to meet a new fundraising goal in the community. If met, it will boost the current unrestricted endowment for the fund, and allow for more grants to local projects.
Ask anyone from Wayne and they’ll tell you, the community is a great place to call home. “Wayne is small, it’s comfortable, and there’s always something going on,” Wayne Area Legacy Fund secretary Karissa Hays said. “I like being a part of a community that can make you feel like every step of the way, you belong.”
As you might imagine, members of the Wayne Area Legacy Fund are doing their part to make sure the town is moving forward. “The Wayne Area Legacy Fund is a resource,” Hays said. “We want to be a partner of the community. We are here to grow an endowment, which will help our non-profits reach potential goals they might not be able to do on their own.”
The unrestricted endowment in Wayne is basically a savings account for the community’s future. “What happens with that endowment is, each year, we are able to pull off the earnings from the fund, and grant that money back into our community,” fund chair Karen Longe said. “It can go back to our non-profits, or our 501 C3’s.” The Wayne Area Legacy Fund has provided money to a number of different projects. The most recent grant was to the Wayne Community Schools’ new early learning center. “It will serve our pre-K through second grade students, and it will be open in the fall,” Longe said. “They asked for help with money to build out their playground. Other grants that we’ve given to the schools include a grant to the e-sports team, the Wayne FFA, and a Wayne Community Schools mental health counseling program.”
Other grants in the community include one to the senior center, and that helped re-felt the pool tables there. We caught up with some of the men at the center who enjoy playing pool, and based on a special thank-you sign on the wall, they were pretty happy with the grant. “We have received wonderful thank you’s from the senior center, and in particular from that group, to have that re-felting,” Longe said. “You can see that group is having a lot of fun.” There’s a long list of other grants that have been given out as well. This includes to local reading programs, to the Wayne Baseball Association, to park projects, and the local childcare center. The public library has also received grant funding. “We helped the library purchase some tablets for English as Second Language learners.”
Many have benefited from the legacy fund’s unrestricted endowment. Now, the Wayne Area Legacy Fund is working to meet a “Gratitude Challenge”. This is designed to take the local unrestricted endowment to new heights. “The Gratitude Challenge was basically proposed to us by Dick and Becky Keidel,” Longe said. “They approached us, along with Nebraska Community Foundation, and created a matching grant opportunity. The challenge to our legacy fund and the community is, we need to raise $300,000 over three years. Once we’ve raised $300,000, the Keidel’s will donate $100,000 to our fund, and Nebraska Community Foundation will donate another $50,000 to our fund.”
If this challenge is met, it means more exciting things for the Wayne community. “At the end of this challenge, we will have increased the amount of our endowment by $450,000,” Longe said. “That’s really exciting for our community, because what it means is, every year we should have around $40,000 to $50,000 to grant into our community, to our non-profits, our school, and our city.” Members of the Wayne Area Legacy Fund are now working to meet the “Gratitude Challenge”, while continuing to enrich the quality of life in Wayne. “One of the things I want to see the legacy fund become is the partner of the entire Wayne area,” Hays said. “We want to be there for our non-profits. We want to be that group that helps build other groups, and helps Wayne grow.”
