Hannah Edwards from the Community Foundation of the Florida Keys joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the organization.
The Community Foundation is a public charity that invests charitable funds for donors and connects donors with nonprofits.
Edwards said, “We say we’re connecting people, resources, and needs throughout the Keys. We were celebrating our 30th anniversary as well. So we’ve been around for 30 years now, and at our annual meeting, some of the founders were there, which was very cool, because they’ve been here for the whole journey. Unfortunately, a few of the founders aren’t with us anymore, but a lot of them are people that we all know in this town, so it was a group of really dedicated local people that got together and said let’s do something for this county, for this community, for the future, and if we all invest together, we can really take care of the Keys for the future. And they were told that it wouldn’t work down here. They were told that the Keys were too small and too spread out and didn’t have enough people. And they said, you know what? We’re going to try it anyway. And they did it. And here we are. So it’s continued to grow over the past 30 years, and it was an exciting annual meeting to be able to give the community an update on where we started and where we are now and where we want to go in the future.”
The Community Foundation exceeded $1 million dollars just last year to nonprofits.
Edwards said, “That’s very exciting for us, is supporting the nonprofits, supporting all these wonderful projects that they do in this community, and we highlighted a few of those in our meeting, just from the past year some of the exciting projects that are going on right now, one of them that we really love is the collaboration between the Good Health Clinic and the SOS Foundation, they collaborated this year to apply for a grant for their Healthy Lives program, and that’s a program that combines healthcare with nutritious meals. So, the SOS Foundation creates nutritious frozen meals that they stock in Good Health Clinic’s freezer, and then when the Good Health Clinic delivers medications to people that aren’t able to come into the clinic, and when they do that, if those people need some nutritious meals as well, if they’re food insecure, they can deliver those meals to them as well, and so they get their medication and their meals. It does a couple things, because some of those medications need to be taken with food, so that’s helpful, and then also many chronic diseases can be helped by good nutrition, so they’re treating both the source of the problem and the symptoms, so it’s a great meal. They’ve already served 660 patients and distributed over 1,200 meals, so we were happy to fund that program.”
Coast Love was also funded by the Community Foundation this year.
Edwards explained, “They’re a small grassroots organization, they have helped people volunteer for cleanups and also mangrove plantings, mangrove restoration projects. So this year we helped fund their mangrove plantings, and they’ve already planted over 350 mangroves. One of the plantings they did was at Camp Wesumkee in Big Pine with the Girl Scouts of Tropical Florida, and that’s been a really fun program, because the Girl Scouts camp there was pretty badly destroyed in Irma, and they haven’t had the funds to repair it, so it’s pretty much been ignored, whereas the Boy Scout camp, they had more funding, it was rebuilt. So, what the Girl Scouts are doing now, with the help of Coast Love, is they’re bringing scouts down, and they’re teaching them sort of rough camping, because they don’t have the shelter there, so they work on all their rough camping skills, and then Coast Love comes in and teaches them about planting mangroves and about the ecology of the local area, and so this year the girls all got a special badge for planting the trees, which is part of the Girl Scouts, it was an initiative this year to plant a certain amount of trees by the end of the year, so they all got that badge, they learned how to plant the mangroves, and they got their rough camping skills, so it’s become an annual tradition for them now, which is very cool, even though they don’t have that facility, but maybe this will inspire somebody to help fund that facility, so that’s another really cool program.”
The Key West Art Center’s Art Spark program also received funding.
Edwards said, “This is a fun program because the Key West Art Center is connecting high school students that are at some of the alternative high schools, like Somerset Academy and CFK Academy, where they don’t have art built into their curriculum, they’ve created a program where the students can come to this art center or to an professional artist studio and a professional artist will teach them about their work, and then the students will make something in that medium, and so they’ve learned all different mediums, they’ve worked with clay, they’ve worked with wood cutting, they’ve worked with murals, paint, different types of painting, glass, all kinds of mediums, and not only is this helping the students see that it’s possible to be a professional artist down here, but it’s also paying the artists, so we’re also giving back to the artists themselves, and that part of our economy here in Key West, and the Key West Art Center supports those artists. It’s a nonprofit, and it is just for Key West artists to display their work. None of the art in there is from people from outside the area, so it’s more of a collective. We have a few of those, and those are really the best places I think to buy my art, so those are just three programs we highlighted, and I like to talk about them, because that’s why we do what we do. We’re really trying to build this community, make this community a better place to live now and in the future.”
The Community Foundation also supports scholarships.
Edwards said, “It’s scholarship season, so all our kiddos are graduating in the next week or so, and that’s always a really exciting time for everybody. So, next week Kevin Bowes, my colleague, will be out in force with some of our board members, presenting those scholarships to the deserving students. And scholarships are a type of fund that people can have with us, that a donor or an organization can have with the Community Foundation. They’re one type of charitable fund. So, the way that works is the donor or the donor organization puts money into that fund. That fund is invested with the rest of our charitable funds, and that way there’s money to give out every year because that fund makes money, so they can keep contributing to it, and it’s a constant source of money to give out to students, so we give out, I think, almost 90 scholarships, so it’s quite a few all up and down the Keys, and I get the chance to review some of these scholarship applications, which is always very uplifting, because there’s so much bad news that we hear every day, but reading what these kids are doing right here in our community, it gives you some faith back in humankind, because they’re out there, they’re volunteering, they are caring about this community, they’re doing so much, and so it’s really nice to read those applications. Got a lot of smart kids around here.”
Anyone can help with the Community Foundation of the Florida Keys.
Edwards said, “Starting a fund is a really, people think that you have to be wealthy to do so, but you really don’t, it’s just a way to invest in the future, and there’s a lot of tax benefits as well, you can start a fund, and then say something comes up, like you have a stock that appreciates a lot, and you don’t want to have to pay taxes on that. You can instead put that into your fund, and you don’t have to pay taxes on any of that capital gains, but you do get the benefit of that full amount of charitable contribution, so there’s some good tax benefits to doing things this way, and then you can grant out of the fund, make donations to local nonprofits as you want to, and there’s various types of funds. That’s a donor-advised fund, there’s scholarship funds, like we mentioned, and you can also just donate directly into our granting funds, which is our Florida Keys Future Funds. So, there’s any number of ways to participate that way. We also really just encourage everybody to connect with us. Follow us on social media, sign up for our newsletter. You can go right to our website and sign up for the newsletter to stay on top of what’s happening, and we have a lot of committees that we could use your help with, if you want to help that way. Give a little bit of your time. We always need people to review our grant application, so we have people up and down the Keys reviewing our grant applications, we’re happy to have you do that as well. So, there’s lots of ways to get involved, and we encourage everybody to do so, because we all care about this place.”
For more information, click here: www.cffk.org