News
April 22nd, 2014
Community Foundation Growing and Moving to New Offices
Your Community Foundation continues to grow to serve you and Tompkins County better and better every day. Late last year we received a generous gift through our Legacy Society from a donor who passed away and listed us as the beneficiary for the majority of her retirement assets. I am happy to share with you that her generosity will enable us to make major expansions to serve even more prospective donors, current donors, professional advisors and nonprofits.
Our expansion will result in the move of the Community Foundation offices to 200 E. Buffalo Street, Suite 202 as of May 1, 2014.
Many people never realized that both our Program Officer and our Donor Services Officer were part time positions. That is a testament to how well Janet Cotraccia and Amy LeViere provided professional services for our grant cycles and our work with donors. In February, we increased these two positions to full time to meet growing demand.
In April we welcomed Myles Gideon, our first ever full time Administrative Assistant. And lastly the gift enables us to hire a full time Chief Development Officer later this year. This new position will be tasked with asset development for increasing our pools of grant making dollars as well as for operations in addition to growth in donations to all types of funds: donor advised funds, field of interest funds and designated.
The decision to expand staff was not reached without critical self examination. Our board of directors made this decision after considerable serious review. Increasing staff will enable us to anticipate, prepare and capitalize on the challenges and opportunities ahead, which we could not do at our current staffing levels. We also researched community foundation life cycles and determined that this expansion fits a typical pattern of growth in other community foundations given our age and asset level.
With deep appreciation we launch into 2014 with renewed vigor, expanded capacity, and excitement to serve our community.