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Eighteen-year-old Claire Higgins Barry will be heading off to Tulane University in the fall, and she hasn’t yet picked a major. But already she’s a philanthropist. This past school year, she served on a Charlottesville Area Community Foundation committee that evaluated 21 area non-profits and chose the University of Virginia’s Teen Health Center to receive a $10,000 Youth Service Award.

The Charlottesville Area Community Foundation (CACF) has been empowering the next generation of philanthropists since 1994, handing out Citizenship Awards for leadership, community service, and academic excellence each spring to one senior from nine local high schools, then teaming them up to expand their charitable horizons. But the award is just one of many ways CACF funnels funds to local non-profit charity organizations.

CACF is a permanent endowment established to improve the quality of life in Charlottesville, Albemarle, Greene, Orange, Louisa, Fluvanna, Buckingham, and Nelson counties. “Our main mission is to promote philanthropy in the community,” says Kevin O’Halloran, CACF’s Director of Donor Relations. CACF’s primary promotional tool is investment. Unique among local charitable organizations, the foundation provides a means for individuals, organizations, and businesses to pool and invest their money, making profits they give to local charities of their choice.

Founded in 1967 by a number of local banks, CACF began with a relatively small purse and grew slowly for its first 30 years. Not until 1998, when it held assets of about $6 million, did it hire a full-time executive director. Today, those 6 million bucks have grown over nine times the size, to 55 million.

CACF administers over 120 funds, ranging in size from $10,000 up to more than $10 million. Region 10, Hospice of the Piedmont, Oratorio Society of Charlottesville Albemarle, and the Virginia Discovery Museum are among the high-profile organizations entrusting it with their investments.

Community Endowment

The oldest of CACF’s funds is its Community Endowment, consisting of monies donated for it to pool, invest, and then dispense as it sees fit. “Donors make contributions to the foundation and we invest the money and we give away a portion of the earnings to local non-profit organizations,” O’Halloran says. “So instead of raising money every year and giving it away every year, we’ve built up an endowment that produces income, and we spend the income.”

CACF’s investment consultant Wachovia Wealth Management manages this pot of money, making small, large, and mid-cap investments, both national and international in scope. “It’s a balanced portfolio,” O’Halloran says. “It’s fairly conservatively invested, because this is an endowment that will be here for the long-term, in perpetuity. It’s designed to return between 8 and 12% a year and to perform well on the downside as well. We have a quite sophisticated investment platform.”

Empowering Philanthropists

While the Community Endowment is CACF’s to dispense as it sees fit, the majority of CACF’s assets are in its donor-advised funds, in which investors get the benefit of CACF’s market expertise and authorize donations to charities of their choice. Among these donor-advised funds are numerous family and memorial funds, as well as corporate and civic endowments. Many are of fairly recent birth.

Boyd C. Tinsley Fund, dating from 2003, “supports development and educational programs for youth.” Companion Animal Fund, created in 2005, “supports local charities related to the interest of animals.” Ballyshannon Fund, created in 2006, promotes “citizen understanding of the economic importance of agricultural and forestry enterprises in Central Virginia and the adjacent areas.” An anonymous donor set up a fund in 2006 to support the work of Charlottesville’s Abundant Life Ministry. Save the Fireworks Fund was established in 2003 to pay for festivities at Charlottesville’s annual Fourth of July celebration.

Some 30 or so area charities have merged their small endowments under CACF’s umbrella. “If you have $50,000 or $100,000, there are a lot of pools you can’t get into,” O’Halloran says. “So we open up to local non-profits so that they can enjoy better money management at a lower cost.”

The Band That Cares

Perhaps the best known of CACF’s donor-advised funds is Bama Works Fund, established in 1999 by homegrown rock royalty, the Dave Mathews Band. In the years since, Bama has donated an astonishing $8.4 million for housing and education, disadvantaged youth and the disabled, and a healthy environment.

“Very soon after they found success, they made a decision to try to help their home community of Charlottesville,” O’Halloran says. “They have a particular interest in supporting needy children and young people. They were very instrumental, no pun intended, in the Music Resource Center and the Paramount.”

Housing for Those Who Serve the Community

One CACF fund that fills a unique place in the community is the Thomas Jefferson Community Workforce Housing Fund, a partnership between the Charlottesville Area Association of REALTORS® (CAAR), Piedmont Housing Alliance, and various area governments, associations, and private businesses.

REALTOR® Jeff Gaffney remembers the circumstances under which the fund was born: “In 2004, we had a real estate economy where prices were appreciating at a much faster rate than incomes, and as a result our workforce in the Charlottesville area -- primarily teachers, police officers, nurses and firefighters -- were being priced out of the market. That whole group was having to go out further and further if they wanted to buy a home.”

“All of Charlottesville prides itself on the terrific quality of life that we have here,” Gaffney says. “At CAAR, we identified a housing issue that directly relates to the quality of life and the vitality of the area potentially eroding. Because what you’re describing is really sprawl: police officers a couple of counties away, and they’ve got to commute in, and they never really become ingrained in the community.”

CAAR’s idea was to provide down payment assistance for the first-time homebuyers among these public servants, to fill the gap between the loan amount they qualified for and the actual cost of housing.

“When we started, we had a goal of raising $500,000,” says Greg Slater, 2009 CAAR president-elect. “Our members stepped up and made a commitment to make a donation over five years, and that’s where most of our generation of funds has come from.”

Today, workers who meet standard Virginia Housing and Development Authority criteria -- an income of 80-120% of area median – can apply for assistance through the Regional Home Ownership Center in the offices of Piedmont Housing Alliance in downtown Charlottesville. When fund recipients sell their homes, they pay back the original principal, plus a percentage of their capital gain, in so doing enlarging the lending pool for future homebuyers.

Gaffney calls the program “a recruiting and retention tool, where if a nurse was considering Charlottesville or Johnson City, Tenn. and we had this fund, it could help swing the best and brightest in those areas and help preserve the quality of life that we all enjoy here.”

“I’d like folks to know that there’s a resource for our local teachers, police officers, firefighters, and nurses to obtain assistance if they need help becoming a homeowner,” Slater says. “The goal is to help these critical people in our community live where they work. The downturn in the real estate market has closed the gap somewhat, but there’s still a need to help people come up with that down payment money that will bridge the gap between what they qualify to borrow and the home prices in our area.”

“The CAAR organization,” Gaffney says, “has always been more than just day-to-day sales processes. The REALTORS® here really do care about the community. It’s a whole lot more than just a job, it’s our life; it’s what we do.” 

Young Professionals for the Future

CACF’s latest venture is the Charlottesville Future Fund, a philanthropic opportunity for 20-, 30-, and 40-somethings. Annual membership fees of $200, $300, and $400 respectively will be pooled and invested together, with 99% of profits distributed at year’s end to local non-profits of the group’s own choosing. The Future Fund will be introduced with a free reception on Tuesday, June 16 at The Local restaurant in Belmont. Jocelyn Scherr is taking reservations at jscherr@cacfonline.org. 

The Kids are Alright

While C’ville-area young professionals are just getting organized as a group, the kids have been plugging away under CACF auspices for 15 years. Each year’s crop of Citizenship Award recipients serves on the Youth Services Committee for the following school year, selecting a favorite organization that serves area youth, and presenting it with a $10,000 grant on the foundation’s behalf in the spring. Past recipients of the Youth Service Award grants include The Music Resource Center, Computers 4 Kids, and Blue Ridge English as a Second Language.

Tulane-bound Claire Barry Higgins was selected for her service as president of Charlottesville High School’s chapter of the Kiwanis Club’s student society, Key Club International. “I was grateful to have an opportunity to be a part of it,” Barry says of the Youth Services Committee. “Each of us individually had worked at our schools and in the community as volunteers, but we had never seen the side process where money plays a role. It was amazing to see 21 non-profits apply for this grant, and to realize the needs of our community. We had to work together and take sides on which non-profits spoke to us, so there was the challenge of 10 leaders fighting for the non-profits that they felt deserved the award. We talked through everything. So there’s a lot to learn from this experience.”

For the 2009 Youth Service Award, the teens chose U.Va.’s Teen Health Center. “We all felt like we could be a part of getting the word out to the community that there is this place that teens can go to receive health care for free and find a person to confide in,” Barry says. “They do a range of health issues. People can go there for any kind of testing or problems that they can’t tell their parents about. But we also felt that the staff there could help the teenager talk with their parents. I think that that was one of their main goals with the program.”

What does Barry want people to know about CACF’s efforts to galvanize the next generation of philanthropists? “It’s a really great program that they put together,” she says. “I feel like the community doesn’t know as much about it as they should. I really want to be a spokesperson for them. This is an important aspect for teenagers to see as valuable for life.”

CACF distributed roughly $4.5 million last year, to a whole panoply of area service groups. And since its inception four decades ago? Someone probably has the numbers somewhere. “There are something like 800 non-profits in the area, and we’ve supported the majority of them,” O’Halloran says. Last year alone, individual contributions numbered around 1,600.            

Aspiring philanthropists of whatever means can make a difference through CACF; the group has received gifts as small as $10 and as large as seven figures. “We try to help all donors regardless of their ability to give,” O’Halloran says. “It’s really wonderful to be part of a community as generous as Charlottesville.”