At Montana conference, foundations hear pleas and strategies for giving more to rural areas

Suzanne Perry of the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports from Missoula, Mont.: “Foundations could help alleviate many of the nation’s most pressing problems by focusing more on the challenges and opportunities of rural America, speakers at a conference on rural philanthropy here said. While they receive fewer philanthropic dollars than urban areas, rural regions have been hit hard by some of the issues that are at the top of the country’s policy agenda — access to health care, immigration of low-wage workers, the need for better schools, and the loss of industrial jobs, they said.”

The conference is sponsored by the Council on Foundations and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, challenged foundations last year to do more for rural areas. Council President Steve Gunderson said that shouldn't mean less for urban areas, because rural areas should tap into “the huge transfer of wealth that is expected to take place over the next 50 years as people die and leave their estates to their heirs,” Perry writes. A good deal of that wealth is in rural land and other assets.

A recent National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy report, Rural Philanthropy: Building Dialogue From Within, "suggests that grant makers send their staff members on more site visits to rural areas and pay for events that bring urban foundations and rural nonprofit groups together,” Perry writes. “People fund people they know,” Dorfman said. “Relationships matter.” The conference ends Thursday. (Read more)

A survey of foundation staffs for the Center for Rural Strategies found “A perception that rural nonprofits lack the capacity to handle grants, a belief that rural funding falls outside many foundations’ interests and missions and sense that physical distance and cultural differences between urban-based philanthropies and rural organizations separate the foundation world and rural America,” the center's Tim Marema writes in the Daily Yonder, the center's new rural-news site. (Read more)