Gift IV Special Grants Update

Bill Goodwin, Jenny Kloer, and Ace Yackey of Lilly Endowment arrived at the Pike County Community Foundation's new field office bright and early on the morning of May 10, 2001 to embark on what would be a whirlwind tour of nearly all of Pike and Daviess Counties.

   The three made the trip from Indianapolis to see firsthand the results of special grants made possible through Phase IV of the Endowment's GIFT (Giving Indiana Funds for Tommorrow) initiative.

   Goodwin is the Endowment's vice president for community development, Kloer is GIFT program director for the Indiana Grantmaker's Alliance, and Yackey is program director for the Endowment.

   As part of the GIFT IV initiative, Indiana Community Foundations were invited to recommend funding for projects that would have a broad and significant impact in their Communities.

   The community foundations comprising the Community Foundation Alliance received a total of nearly $6.5 million in special grants. The visits to Pike and Daviess Counties were the last in planned tours to each of the nine counties that make up the Alliance - visits to Gibson, Knox, Perry, Posey, Spencer, Vanderburgh, and Warrick Counties took place last year.

    The Pike County Community Foundation's board president Wayne Malotte, along with field representative June Miller, hosted the visitors during their tour of the county, which included visits to four of five Pike County nonprofit organizatons, for which the foundation recomended and received $500,000 in grants. They included the North Patoka Volunteer Fire Department in Winslow, the Lockhart Township Community Center in Stendal, the Winslow Community Center, and the Old Ben Scout Reservation of the Boy Scouts of America in Otwell.

   After lunch, Goodwin, Kloer and Yackey traveled to Washington in Daviess County to meet with Gail Doades, vice president of the Daviess County Community Foundation's board of trustees, and Jeanne Fields, Field Representative. The Foundation granted $700,000 to nonprofit organizations in Daviess County through Lilly Endowment's GIFT IV program.

   The afternoon included visits to Barr-Reeve Junior/Senior High School in Montgomery to meet the president of the Barr-Reeve Scholarship Foundation; to the Daviess County YMCA, 4-H Association, and Power House in Washington; and to the Daviess County Fairgrounds in Elnora.

   "These are just the types of projects we had in mind when developing the GIFT IV initiative," said Goodwin. "We couldn't be more pleased wth the positive impact these grants have had in southern Indiana."