Hannah Edwards, Director of Philanthropy and Outreach with the Community Foundation of the Florida Keys, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about their projects.
The foundation’s Center for Nonprofit Excellence can really help nonprofits.
Edwards said, “That is what we call all of the services and programming that we provide for the nonprofits in the Florida Keys. Of course, the grant program is a huge part of that. So we’re about to open up our grant applications, the grants will be open from September 2 to September 30 this year, and we encourage all the nonprofits to apply. This year, we’re going to allow higher awards for any nonprofit that collaborates with another nonprofit on their grant application, because we are hoping that when nonprofits can collaborate, it saves in administration costs, and so that kind of helps everybody. So we’re hoping to encourage that a little bit by offering a higher award level for that. You can apply for up to 30,000 if you collaborate, and up to 20,000 for a single nonprofit. Then we try to involve, we grant out all the money that we have to give in our grant cycle, and then we also send these grant applications to all of our fund holders that make grants, so that they can see if there’s anything that they would also like to fund. That allows us to give a much larger pot to the nonprofits. So that’s all coming up, but what we also do is we also have some other programming for the nonprofits. We have what we call Florida Keys Nonprofit Day once a year, and that is a day of interactive learning and networking and collaboration for all the Nonprofit Professionals in the Keys. It’s open to board members, volunteers, staff, leadership. We do limit it to four participants per nonprofit to give everybody a chance to participate, all the organizations a chance to participate, and I’ve done it every year. This will be the fourth year. I’ve done it for the last three years as a non profit professional, when I worked for Habitat, and I always found it really valuable, both the programming or the learning part of it, and then the networking as well, because we don’t get a chance to see everybody up and down the Keys very often. We kind of stick in our little region, whether that is Key West or the Lower Keys or the Middle Keys or the Upper Keys, kind of stick to your little group. So it really does give a chance to meet other professionals and figure out how you can help each other out. I think that our nonprofit community down here is really great about helping each other. I know in some places, there is that sort of competitive vibe where you all feel like you’re competing for pieces of the same pie. But I really don’t think that’s a great way to look at it. I think that we work so much better together, and I think that people are willing to give where they see great work being done. I don’t see it in that mindset and I think most of the nonprofits don’t, I think they’re really open to helping each other. We see that also in our morning marketing exchange, that is a monthly meetup online that I facilitate with Amy Cornaire from the Ocean Reef Community Foundation, and it is a peer led group that tackles different topics in marketing and fundraising, because they kind of go hand in hand, and we have been doing that for two years now. We take July and August off, just to kind of regroup, but it’s been a very valuable resource for nonprofits as well. We welcome input on topics to tackle. Sometimes we bring in somebody from outside our community to speak about a subject and sometimes one of the nonprofits here is really excellent at something, and so we asked them to present about that topic, like we had SOS Foundation present about their volunteer program, because they just do an amazing job with that. So that’s been very successful. Anybody interested in participating that you can email me and we’ll put you on the list. We’re planning the sessions for this coming season right now.”
There is also the Leadership Success Academy.
Edwards said, “That is an annual boot camp training for nonprofit leaders and board members. So that would be for CEOs and presidents and directors and board members, and that is hands on training and best practices for leadership in nonprofits and governance skills, board skills. The next one is going to actually be fall 2026. We had been doing it in the spring, but, everything’s happening in the spring, so we’re going to push it to the fall this year.”
The Unsung Heroes is another great program.
Edwards said, “That’s a great way we celebrate the volunteers in our community who do so much to help all the nonprofits who do so much to help the community. So that’s an amazing annual celebration honoring one volunteer from all the nonprofits in the Keys, and we try to continue to honor those volunteers throughout the year and we just try to keep honoring our wonderful volunteers. Everybody knows what’s happening in the Keys and the state and the country and the world right now. So everyone is sort of pitching in and a great way to pitch in is through the Community Foundation, because we really try to get all the money that gets donated to us, we get right out there in the community and spread it out among where it’s needed the most. So I encourage everybody to participate of they can. We’re great at stepping up, and now is the time.”
For more information, click here: https://cffk.org/