Building a Stronger CSRA: The Power of Community

And I think, too, one of the things that I'm sort of drawing from what you're saying is I think you used the word nimble and flexible.

A good example of that may be Hurricane Helene.

Yes.

You know, Hurricane Helene hits, and I think that, at least for me, so many people were trying to figure out, how do I help? You know, people either in this community or friends from outside of this community.

So maybe talk a little bit about what the Community Foundation did and why they're probably – well-positioned to help in an instance like that?

Well, community foundations across the country have really stepped in in this particular space, emergency response.

One of the great tools is what I mentioned at the beginning, that we have this financial stewardship.

We can immediately set up a fund to receive donations.

Literally, we had our Hurricane Helene Community Crisis Fund set up The storm hit us Thursday night.

By Friday afternoon, the fund was set up, and already we had people reaching out and wanting to donate to it.

Community foundations are a known entity by national funders.

It's a recognized thing.

donors from across that we had donors from london we had donors from the coast we had donors from all over the world who wanted to support augusta and they knew they could put the money at the community foundation so they know we're going to steward it correctly

yeah

right then because of our relationship with all these non-profits in the first 10 days after the storm We, a lot of those nonprofits didn't have power.

It couldn't get out of their own homes.

So you're talking about the food bank, the red cross, the United way, all of these folks are trying to operate and they're trying to operate.

But we know all those people by a cell phone.

Like, So we

were calling those executive directors and getting real-time updates about what they were seeing on the ground and where they needed help.

And so we were able to put $100,000 grants, $200,000 grants, $300,000 grants to work literally within six days.

To the people who needed it on the ground.

Correct, who needed it on the ground.

So

that, because we're in those relationships and we see their financials, we know their board members, we know how they operate, it's really easy to act fast.