Powerful Spirit of Community

As one who has the privilege of working for the Door County Community Foundation, I am often called upon to offer a few comments at various fundraisers and community events about the importance of giving back. I was jotting down some notes for a recent talk when I realized something truly unique about the name “Door County Community Foundation.” The first 10 letters spell out “Door County.” The last 10 letters spell out “foundation.” At the literal center of our name is the word “community.”

There’s a wonderfully symmetry about that because I frequently talk about the power of the spirit of community. I share that belief not out of some Pollyannic, goody two shoes notion of political correctness. Community is critically important for a very practical reason. Simply put, our most intractable problems cannot be solved by a single person, or institution, acting alone.

I normally don’t talk or write a lot about the everyday work at the Community Foundation, but I think telling you the story about our Advancement Grants program will help you understand why coming together as a community is so critically important.

The Community Foundation’s Advancement Grants invest in collaborative efforts which lead to systemic change. These grants support initiatives that look at entire systems in our community and work to bring about greater efficiencies if not a wholesale change in how things are done.

For instance, imagine what it would be like to live in Door County if you didn’t have a car.

Perhaps you’re one of our community’s working poor and you just can’t afford a car. Maybe you have a car, but it broke down in the middle of winter and you won’t have the money to repair it until your seasonal job starts up in the spring. Or perhaps you’re just getting older and your doctor says you shouldn’t be driving anymore.

How are you supposed to get around this long and narrow Door County peninsula? How do you get to the grocery store, go to church on Sunday, or get to your doctor’s appointment?

Thanks to an enormous collaborative effort between the United Way, Sunshine House, the Senior Center, local government, and many others, Door County now has a flexible route shared taxi system. A resident can now get from far Northern Door, into Sturgeon Bay, and as far south as Southern Door and Algoma.

This project has been an enormous success, and an incredibly cost-efficient one as well, because people and organizations came together as a community to solve the problem. It’s also an example of the Community Foundation using the community’s gifts in the best way possible.

The Community Foundation made the initial significant investment in what would become Door-Tran. We drafted the documents to create the new charitable corporation. And we so believed in the potential of this project that one of our board members, John Herlache, served as a key organizer and eventual president of the new Door-Tran Board. We continue to support this effort by regularly investing money in it year after year.

Not too long ago there was no single charity addressing the problem of transportation. Even if you wanted to make a charitable gift to deal with this issue, there was no place to which you could write your check. The only way we could have accomplished this goal was when we decided to work together as a community.

It’s with that same community-building ethic in mind that Door County COIN was publicly launched earlier this year. The Community Foundation built a partnership with the Door County Economic Development Corporation, with the local banks, and local philanthropists. Together we created COIN – the Community Opportunity Investment Network.

The COIN Micro-Loan Program is designed to encourage entrepreneurs to start or expand their small businesses in Door County. We are stimulating economic activity, and changing lives, one new job at a time. We’ve also launched the COIN Business Mentoring Program so that experienced business leaders, can give back to our community by offering guidance and counsel to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

We need to make investments in human service programming, but a stable, year-round job with decent pay and benefits is far more effective at changing lives than any human service program that we could create.

This is what we do at the Community Foundation. We bring together charities, government, businesses, and philanthropists to accomplish goals that none of us could realize on our own.

This winter, we’ll be publicly launching the Door County Scholarship Network.

It’s a collaborative effort of all five Door County school districts and Door County’s major scholarship programs. Our goal is to make college more affordable for promising students by connecting them with financial aid opportunities. We’re creating an online searchable database of scholarships for Door County kids. Students will enter some basic information and the search engine will compile a list of scholarships for which the student likely qualifies.

The Door County Scholarship Network could not thrive were it not for the support of all the local school districts and the major scholarship programs in Door County. Yet it was only when we began working together as a community that we could accomplish this goal.

At the Community Foundation we believe in the power of the spirit of community. I don’t necessarily mean spirit in a religious sense, although some might feel it that way.

I mean the spirit that comes from the strength of a fellowship of people that can look beyond what separates them and find a way to unite to serve something larger than themselves.

At the Door County Community Foundation, “community,” quite literally, is our middle name.