Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

When Erin Borla stepped up to help her family’s foundation expand its work in rural Oregon, she was surprised to learn that rural-focused grant-makers like the Roundhouse Foundation were few and far between.

Thinking she would quickly find other foundations specializing in rural grant-making, she called philanthropy service organizations to get connected to the field. But she repeatedly got the same disappointing response:

“You’re the only organization we work with that works just in rural,” Borla said.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Private philanthropy consistently under-invests in rural America, according to numerous studies by people like the late Rick Cohen and organizations like the USDA Economic Research Service.

Borla slowly found a national community of rural grant-makers and is now sharing the story of rural philanthropy and community development through “Funding Rural,” a podcast she developed as part of a fellowship with the National Center for Family Philanthropy.

The podcast launched its second season on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tim Marema, The Daily Yonder: I heard you speak at a workshop in Redmond, Oregon, hosted by the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism. You said, “You may not know who I am, but you know my grandmother.” That struck me as such a small-town way to introduce yourself. So tell us about your grandmother and what she has to do with the work that you are doing now.

Erin Borla: My grandmother was Gert Boyle, who was the CEO and president of the board for Columbia Sportswear. She was a Jewish immigrant who came with her family in the late 1930s from Germany in the midst of the Holocaust. They were one of the first Jewish immigrant families that moved to Portland [Oregon]. She moved to Portland when she was 13 with her parents and her two sisters. She started in the first grade as a 13-year-old. I now have a 14-year-old, and I can’t imagine him starting in the first grade. The only English she knew was “Hot Cross Buns,” which doesn’t get you very far, by the way.

She quickly moved back up to the grade level that she was supposed to be at. She graduated from Grant High School in Portland and then went to the University of Arizona, where she met my grandfather.

DY: You live in Central Oregon. Tell me how you got there.

EB: My grandmother and grandfather had three kids. My mom’s the middle child, and she’s an artist. She met my dad when they were studying in Italy. My dad’s a school teacher. They moved to Central Oregon. My dad taught at Bend High School. Most folks know Bend, Oregon, was one of the fastest growing cities in the country for a long time. They moved to Bend when Bend was 25,000 people [it now has over 100,000 residents] and fell in love with the place. We’ve been here ever since.

We moved to Sisters, which is also in Deschutes County, but it was 400 people when we moved here in the early 1990s. We have lived here since then.

DY: How did the foundation get started?

EB: Oregon is a big state. It’s the 10th in the nation in land area. But a lot of the commerce that happens [in Oregon] happens in about a 40-mile radius up outside of Portland [about three hours northwest of Central Oregon].

As my mother had the opportunity to be more involved in community in the late 1990s, she recognized it was really hard for folks to get access to capital and activities. So she worked really hard to be on boards and try and bring creative people to the table. With her background in arts, that was an important thing for her was bringing creative folks to the conversation.

The joke in the family is that my grandmother got tired of my mom saying, “Hey, my friend’s doing a cool project, I need $500.” So they started a small foundation. It was based here in Central Oregon, primarily serving the community of Sisters, which at that point had grown to about 2,000 people.

The foundation focused on creative problem solving. [They] recognized really quickly, it’s hard to be creative when your teeth hurt and you don’t have access to good water or good schools. So they expanded our program areas to include education, social service, and environmental stewardship and have continued to do that work.

So that’s sort of our grounding. And then we also run a 260-acre working ranch here in Sisters that serves as an artist residency and living/learning laboratory for our partners on regenerative agricultural practices.

My grandmother passed in 2019 and left our organization assets as part of her estate plan. We grew over a thousand percent in 24 months.

DY: The Roundhouse Foundation is focused on rural Oregon. You’re one of a handful of philanthropies that focuses exclusively on grant-making in small cities and rural areas. Who are your peers in that field?

EB: I’m going to step back a little bit. When I stepped in as a staff person – we’re a very relational family – we want to know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. We want to be able to connect you to somebody else. So if you’re a food bank in Burns, Oregon, I want to make sure that you know that somebody in Coos Bay, which is a similar size, is dealing with a similar issue.

I made the assumption that that’s how a lot of philanthropic organizations also worked. I picked up the phone and called what, in our world, are called PSOs, philanthropy-serving organizations, which are sort of chambers of commerce for philanthropy. And I said, “Hey, we are growing. I want to be your ‘needy’ best friend, and I want you to introduce me to everybody that’s done this work before. And we focus primarily in rural.”

And every phone call they said, “You’re the only organization we work with that works just in rural.” And I said, “I don’t understand.”

I think the statistic is 97% of our land area for the country is considered rural or remote, representing 19% of the population. “What do you mean [you don’t know other rural philanthropies]?” It was bizarre to me.

I kept kind of asking those questions, and I got connected to an organization out of D.C. that was a think-tank putting together a rural conversation. I joined thinking, yes, these are going to be the folks that are also doing work like we are. And there were only three of us that were place-based, rural focused out of the entire group.

But I will say I met people through that conversation. So there’s TLL Temple out of East Texas, Ford Family Foundation here in Oregon based in Roseburg, primarily rural-focused in Oregon and Siskiyou County, California. And Wild Rivers Community Foundation. So there’s a select few community foundations. There’s some really small private family foundations like ours. There’s some larger family foundations, a lot of healthcare conversion funds [charitable organizations created when nonprofit healthcare institutions convert to for-profit], particularly in the South that we’re seeing. But it’s a lonely road and especially if you try to figure out where your niche is, we are really trying to find each other still.

DY: Part of your outreach and connecting with other philanthropies and nonprofit organizations is your podcast, “Funding Rural.” For your second season, you’ve interviewed a variety of people who are working in rural philanthropy, conservation, medicine, cultural issues, and more. And I’m on that list, too. What’s the need you are filling by producing the podcast?

EB: Well, like I mentioned, when I first started I felt like I was swimming by myself, treading water, saying, “But wait a minute, what works in a metropolitan community doesn’t always translate in a smaller place or a place that’s farther away from where decisions are made, or where power is held, or where money is.”

So how do we really tell the story of what’s happening in rural America?

And then, we’re a pretty divided country right now. We’re consistently looking for a way to point the finger at somebody else and say it’s somebody else’s problem. If only they knew better. So there was this moment of, well, I want to be able to answer the questions that so many people have asked of why is rural important? Why do you only fund in rural? How do you do that work? How do you build relationships?

But I also recognize it wasn’t my story, it was the stories of the people we work with. I wanted not only to elevate their work but then also try to build this sense of common humanity.

DY: When I was in newspapers and living in the communities the papers covered, I sometimes felt that I had a bullseye on my back, because I was so accountable to the people I was writing about and commenting on. Is there something similar in place-based rural philanthropy? You’re making grants within an area where people know you, and they can stop you and say, “Hey, do you have money for this?”

EB: I also wrote for our local paper for a while, so it was very similar actually. There’s this level of accountability. You conduct yourself in a certain way if you know that you are also representing an organization.

I think the other piece that’s been a little bit more challenging, particularly here locally, is it’s not our money. We’re the stewards of the foundation’s money. So there’s some education around that.

We have a community grant review process where we have 20 people from across the state that help us review applications. It’s not just the magical “unicorn family” of three making decisions.

We hire staff that are in communities, as well. Twenty-five percent of their job is to be on the road and drive to places like Jordan Valley (Malheur County), like Williams (Josephine County) and Otis (Lincoln County) and places like this that are population 60 to 600. So that’s important.

We’re a part of the community, and we show up for community as best we can. But we have to be accountable, and we hold ourselves to a pretty high standard.

DY: Tell me a little bit more about what you mean that it’s not your money.

EB: Well, it’s not. When you create a private foundation or you give your money to a donor-advised fund at a public foundation, you no longer hold the ownership of those dollars. You are the steward of those dollars according to however you have set up your organization.

You do your best to do what is right with your mission and guidelines. But it’s not like Erin’s pocketbook, so it’s not Erin’s decision. We are trying to answer the question, “How do we best fulfill our mission by partnering with organizations that also fulfill that mission and supporting them in the best way possible.” And that’s a big deal. That money’s in the public trust.

This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.

Join my email list

_{By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.}

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

The post Q&A: Why Does Rural-Specific Philanthropy Matter? appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

News Source : https://dailyyonder.com/qa-why-does-rural-specific-philanthropy-matter/2024/09/27/