How is that one community of 15,000 can have 39 foundations with over $250 million in assets? The smallest has $400,000, several have tens of millions of dollars, and two have $80 and $90 million each. At a 4% spending rate that is $10 million in annual giving! I had to find out how Sheridan, WY ended with so many foundations. How did the first one get started?
Edward A. Whitney was born in Massachusetts and educated in Europe, but found his way to Sheridan in 1885 when the three year old town had less than 100 residents. He quickly started the town’s first bank and delved into ranching. Never marrying, he was a very frugal person, living his entire life in a small apartment above the bank. He never owned house, car or even a horse and buggy. However, he traveled extensively over the entire world.
When he passed away in 1917 he bequeathed his estate to the town he had grown to love in his 32 years of residency. His will read, “My estate does not belong to me. I’m only its steward: it belongs to the people and I dare not be careless with it.” He specified that the Whitney Benefits Foundation should have 3 areas of focus in Sheridan, offering interest free loans for students; development of a community center; and establishment of an agricultural school.
From an initial funding of less than $1 million the Whitney Benefits has grown to over $90 million today and has dramatically improved the quality of life in Sheridan. In the last 10 years it has given over $20 million to Sheridan College, a two year community college and ag school built on Whitney property. Over $15 million in loans have been made to almost 5,000 students in Sheridan. A beautiful YMCA, new ice rink (Sheridan won the state hockey tournament this year), park and other improvements to this thriving agurb® have also been completed. Plans are in the works to improve Sheridan’s already thriving downtown area.
Other citizens of Sheridan have followed the lead of Mr. Whitney, giving back to their hometown. I was amazed when I was researching these foundations. In my travels and researching of hundreds of small towns the largest foundation I’ve found has been $20 million in a community of 20,000. Sheridan has over 10 times that amount! It is incredible how the vision of one person can shape a community and a region for generations.
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5 comments:
Jack,
Your comments about the community foundation in Wyoming got me thinking about an old Chronicle of Philanthropy study (5-1-03), which examined charitable giving for all of the counties in this country. They looked at charitable giving as a percentage of discretionary income and then ranked the counties. I went back to the data and compared it to your list of Golden Eagles. Of the 100 Golden Eagles identified in Boomtown U.S.A., 65% of them were in Counties that were more charitable then the national average. Since the research indicates that wealthier households tend to give a LOWER percentage of their disposable income to charitable causes, this might again indicate that some pretty spectacular things are happening in these communities.
While the charitable giving data is only available for counties, I noted that several of the golden eagles were within Counties that exceeded 10% of discretionary income (The national average for charitable giving was 6.4%):
Cumberland, TN (Crossville) - 10.7%
Greene, TN (Greenville) - 12.0%
Teton, WY (Jackson) - 15.1%
Lincoln, NM (Ruidoso) - 11.6%
Bonner, ID (Sandpoint) - 10.5%
Sanpete, UT (Ephraim) - 21.1%
Cache, UT (Logan) - 20.0%
Washington, UT (St. George) - 19.8%
As you might imagine, the Mormon church has had a significant impact on charitable giving in Utah....it would be interesting to know what spurred charitable giving in these other communities?
Andy Lewis
Community Development Specialist
Center for Community Economic Development
University of Wisconsin Extension
Andy: That is some great research that you've done. Would you be willing to share with me?
I think that you are onto something and I'd like to look into it more.
Thanks for sharing your info on my blog.
jack schultz
Jack,
You can take a look at the piece I did for Wisconsin on this topic at:
http://www.uwex.edu/ces/cced/CommunityIndicators_philanthropy.htm
It would be relatively easy to do a similar analysis for other states.
Andy
unfortunately the link no longer works. I'd love to see the stats that support this theory. I believe it, I just need to have the data to prove it. Thanks
Brenda,
Thank you for looking! The link has been removed. The information from that post came from http://www.philanthropy.com/. Hopefully this will help you! Good luck.
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