Q&A with Community Foundation of Elkhart County president Pete McCown
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With over 600 funds and $451 million in total assets, the Community Foundation of Elkhart County received $39 million in gifts and granted $31 million to the community in the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Early childhood, career development, entrepreneurship, and placemaking efforts were some of the causes the organization focused on this year. The nonprofit also made several key hires and promotions as some of its leaders prepare for retirement.
Inside INdiana Business spoke with President Pete McCown about some of the challenges faced, the accomplishments and the impact of community generosity.
This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.
How has 2024 been for the foundation?
2024 has been a great year for the foundation. We received a nearly historic number of gifts, both in terms of amount and numerical count. In total, $39 million of contributions. We had a year in which we received a $150 million gift about 12 years ago, which would be our historic high. It would be hard to beat that one, but this was a great year. The performance of the stock market is an important factor for us as well, we grew by about $60 million.
More importantly, in the last couple of years, we launched two initiatives. We have a bike trail initiative in which we are trying to double the number of bike trail miles in Elkhart County and connect Elkhart County to St Joseph County, Kosciusko County, and Southern Michigan. That has gone very nicely. This last year, we’ve added a considerable number of bike trail miles. Two major bike trail systems are in the engineering phase, one from downtown Elkhart that will connect all the way to the Mishawaka Riverwalk, and one that is intended to go from downtown Goshen to Wakarusa and then down to Nappanee.
A couple years ago, we launched an Early Childhood initiative called Building Strong Brains, focused on kindergarten readiness. That’s going quite nicely as well. We’ve hired a team of people, and we have about 50 different organizations that have signed on to be part of this coalition.
McCown speaks about some of the Community Foundations achievements and partnerships for 2024.
Does the foundation do any work with regards to child care and access to child care?
Yes, so that’s part of our Building Strong Brains work. We’ve identified through research that there are really three major factors contributing to the health and vitality of a child. One is making sure that mom and baby are well cared for in prenatal and then infant medical care. The other is support for the families that are raising that child. The third category is all these early learning, preschool environments—both making sure that they are of good quality, as well as ensuring there is a sufficient number of child care spots. We’re about 1,000 spots behind where we would like to be in Elkhart County, so we’re working away at helping churches start preschools and helping organizations expand capacity.
What was the organization’s biggest challenge in 2024, and how did you overcome it?
Internally, one thing that we have now solved that was of concern to me earlier this year was the decision by our chief program officer, Candy Yoder, to retire at the end of this calendar year. She’s going to stay with us part time in this early childhood work. That’s her area of expertise, but she has been a terrific senior executive at the foundation and a good partner to me. So replacing her was a daunting decision. Fortunately, we landed in the right place with the promotion of Guy Fisher. Then the addition of Andy Murray, former chief revenue officer at Lippert Components before he retired at age 52. So we still got a lot of tread on Andy’s tires, he’s joining us as our director of strategic initiatives.
Something else I’m proud of is hiring Kevin Deary about a year ago. Kevin is the retired 30-year executive director of the Boys and Girls Club of Elkhart County and is well regarded and well experienced. He is doing professional and organizational coaching. More than a 100 of our nonprofit executive directors are involved in peer learning round tables, and we offer at least a monthly workshop. This month, we had a consultant with fundraising experience sharing best practices. We’ve had sessions on human resources, organizational culture, board governance, and strategic planning. We’re trying to help these organizations become the best they can be, so that our grant dollars are deployed most effectively.
We opened the Tolson Center in November 2023 after about five years of fundraising, due diligence, and organizing. I don’t put that into the 2024 category, but it certainly is fair to include that. I’m delighted with the executive director, Brianna Allen, who is leading that work. The Tolson Center is achieving the vast majority of what we imagined in 2018. So to cut the ribbon and see kids and families in that space is quite rewarding.
In October of 2023 we received an invitation from the Lilly Endowment to apply for as much as $11.5 million dollars. There is a matching component, so far we’ve raised just shy of $5 million locally. A lot of that goes into our early childhood work, and the Tolson Center was a piece of that. We’re waiting on word from the endowment by the end of this year on a $7.5 million dollar application that we submitted for Gift VIII. We’re optimistic that will be a positive decision.
This year, we also celebrated the completion of the Pumpkin Vine Trail. We drove a golden spike into the last mile of that bike trail that now has 17 miles of off-road trail system between Shipshewana, Middlebury, and Goshen. We merged the work of the foundation, which was called “Connecting Elkhart County,” with that of the Friends of the Pumpkin Vine Trail. We’ve now rebranded the entire bike trail system in Elkhart County, the Pumpkin Vine Trail Coalition.
What were the biggest priorities in terms of grant funding for 2024?
Building Strong Brains and the Trail Coalition would be two of our major areas of emphasis. Our third category is in this career pathways space. We have partnered with Horizon Education Alliance, Goshen College and the seven public school systems. We’ve been a grant maker to that work, but we haven’t really been actors on the field. Then our normal grant making across all categories.
We also provided a lead gift to help achieve a new visitor center at the Wellfield Botanic Gardens that will open next month. That’s about a $15 million fundraising effort, we made a $2 million grant. One of our founding board members, and her husband made a $2 million grant to that project as well. That really got them off and started with essentially a $4 million lead gift.
Did the Foundation do any work with regards to entrepreneurship and innovation this year?
We partner with the South Bend-Elkhart Regional Partnership in that space. We are a grant-maker to that organization. They have a Startup South Bend-Elkhart task force led by Susan Ford of Graham Allen Partners. I’ve been chair of the Regional Partnership for the last 10 years. We are currently administering the READI 2.0 grant. I recently heard 19 presentations from applicants and in the next few weeks, we’ll be making and announcing $45 million worth of awards to some of those projects.
Reflecting on what the Foundation was able to achieve this year, how did the community show up?
Giving money is only one contribution; we also have a volunteerism platform. We believe that time, treasure, and talent go together. Ashley Jordan, the director of our Acts of Service program, has helped organize tens of thousands of hours of volunteerism.
What’s 2025 shaping up to look like?
Continued focus on Building Strong Brains. It needs another few years to really perform at the highest level we hope it will be. I’m not all that eager to take on more until we get that program in a really good place. But who knows what comes next around here? Most people don’t know this, but the foundation is the majority owner of the Elkhart Health and Aquatics Center. Beacon is our operating partner, but we have a board of seven that oversee that facility, and five of them are foundation appointments.
We never would have intended to raise $70 million to build and operate that facility, except for the fact that the YMCA closed. The same would be true of the Tolson Center; we only stepped in after the city defunded and closed it. So I really don’t know what might come in 2025. There are Monday mornings when some of the staff are a little worried when they come walking in the door, because they have no idea what Pete will have committed to.
What’s your message for the people of Elkhart County as we go into the new year?
You know, I think Elkhart County is experiencing quite a renaissance, and I’ve lived here for 20 years. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new construction happening right here; I can see it out my window.
Elkhart is this really special place in terms of people’s generosity and support of the nonprofit organizations. On any given night, I could go to an auction and see the Samaritan Center raise a half a million dollars at the event, or go to the Boys and Girls Club and see them raise a million and a half dollars. Just watching generosity happen in this community is quite inspiring to all of us, and we’re privileged we get to be a part of that.
We really hope that that expands to the next generation. I’m pretty optimistic that there’s evidence that it’s not just a bunch of 60-year olds that are donating; it’s 40-year olds, 30-year olds, and 50-year olds. So the future of Elkhart is really quite bright.
Our mission is really two-part. One is to improve the quality of life in Elkhart County. You can see that with our work in volunteerism, nonprofit coaching, grant making and community leadership. Then the other half focused on inspiring generosity. So improving the quality of Elkhart County by inspiring generosity, in terms of helping people give generously to causes. Sometimes we’re the right instruments. Sometimes we’re just making introductions. I love to see people give to the United Way. I love to see people give directly to causes, and sometimes we are the right way for them to do their giving.
We’ve had two individuals walk into our office in the course of the last six months, we’re meeting them for the first time and they disclose that they are leaving their entire estate to us at the end of their lifetime, and these are both multi-million dollar estates. When we ask, what’s behind this? They say, “This is my community. I know what the community foundation exists to do, and you are the right destination for whatever is left when I’m going.” That is a pretty clear example of why we do what we do.
