Q&A: Community Foundation of Kawartha Lakes

Advocate Publisher Roderick Benns recently caught up with Laurie Dillon-Schalk, executive director of Community Foundation of Kawartha Lakes. The foundation has been making its presence felt in many ways across the city with multiple funds and initiatives that are improving the quality of life for local residents.

Advocate: We understand you’re building a closer relationship with Kawartha Lakes – the city. What is the nature of this funding and why is this partnership important? What kinds of things will this connection make possible?

Dillon-Schalk: First, it helps to better understand what kind of charity a community foundation is. We are a charity with the special designation of multipurpose public foundation, which means in addition to our own charitable projects, we can attract, administer, and grant funds on behalf of a fundholder to other qualified organizations.

So by our nature, we are focused on a broad spectrum of community needs, and in many ways very much aligned to the same goals as the municipality. We are both interested in improving the quality of life and sense of belonging in Kawartha Lakes. So a partnership with the city just makes good business sense.
  
Advocate: Improving quality of life is somewhat of an audacious goal. How do you tackle an issue this broad? Where do you start?

Dillon-Schalk: Well, first it’s important to have a healthy public foundation. We are focused on ensuring a healthy non-profit ecosystem encouraging people to give where they live and facilitate granting. We are grateful to be receiving municipal financial supports for our operation for the next 18 months. ($126,000 over 18 months.) Our charity was founded just weeks ahead of the pandemic and while we have facilitated an incredible amount of granting, more than $1.3 million, we are shifting from a volunteer organization to a permanent structure. I was hired in January 2023. We have an office, we have built up a sophisticated infrastructure for donation administration and funds management, but we are still in startup mode and operating support during this window makes a big difference to our ability to serve.

Advocate: So that’s the financial ‘how’ part. What about the tackling quality of life improvements?

Dillon-Schalk: There is a strong sense of urgency when it comes to improving quality of life. Not everyone is thriving and we need to act fast in addressing community needs. That’s where data and research can help identify issue areas and support informed action — or even policy changes.

We plan on introducing Vital Signs research in 2025. Vital Signs is a standardized approach to measuring a community’s well-being across major indicators like health, housing, food security, income and poverty, public safety, and more. It is a research project that emphasizes local data but also includes community consultation (called Vital Conversations).

Fortunately, the municipality has already made good progress in this area, already has access to a reservoir of community data and is interested in data-informed action. So a partnership can help us deliver a stronger report and collaborate where it makes sense.

Once we have a better roadmap to the issues or areas that are doing well, we need help to create a granting avenue, getting the funds to the right organizations.

It is early days on creating funding avenues to support issues but fundamentally, we recognize that many organizations doing impactful work in communities are non-profits without charitable status (also called non-qualified donees). Partnering with these organizations can offer significant scale to tackling issues — like adding accessibility to parks, for example, or supporting recreational building improvements, or offering emergency relief.

Advocate: Describe your partnership with Trent University. What aspect of this partnership are you most excited about?

Dillon-Schalk: We are excited to partner with Trent University and Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough, to launch a non-profit management essentials micro credential.  This 10-course curriculum can be taken a la carte or in whole to earn a digital certificate. It has been very carefully designed to build a more talented, resilient non-profit workforce.

The aspect I’m most excited about is how this partnership came about. By the nature of our foundation work, we spend a lot of time with other community foundations. We’ve been hearing about a lack of treasurers, or strong interest in learning more financial operations, or governance, the struggle to recruit volunteers or just keeping up with changing regulations and compliance. We sat down with Donna Goodwin in Economic Development and Diane Steven in the Small Business Centre, both of whom are with the municipality to come up with a solution. We pitched a micro credential program to Trent University and were accepted. We have courses priced as low as we can, almost 40 per cent lower than other similar programs, and are sharing information on grants that support nonprofits sign ups.

Advocate: Let’s highlight some of the funds you’re already supporting. Maybe you could mention three or four of the many you have. Can you explain why they’re important for the community?

Dillon-Schalk: We have more than 20 funds. I’ll start with two funds that are projects of the foundation, where we play a more active role in oversight, fundraising and initiative. (Remember we have the dual ability to act as a charity with our own projects or as a public foundation attracting and granting at the direction of a fundholder.)

Let’s start with the Grove Theatre Fund. One of our first charitable projects was in support of building an outdoor amphitheatre in Fenelon Falls. Four years later, we are still part of the oversight committee of the Grove, and we manage all the donations, tax receipting and fund administration. We are proud of the Grove, its staff and leadership. It is one of the best examples of how a community can get together to produce lasting impact.

Plant Kawartha, led by Sandi and Richard Gauder, is a fund to help find opportunities to improve biodiversity in Kawartha Lakes. We recently planted 25 mature trees this fall at Coboconk Public School to improve the urban canopy at local schools. This continues the excellent work by John Ireland Sr. with our Canopy Project Fund where we supported six area school plantings last year. The Gauders are representing the foundation at an upcoming climate change gathering so that we can deepen our commitments to the environment under their leadership.

100 Men Who Care is a new fund for us in 2024 which is just a ton of fun. Charity circles are often the first experience people have with ongoing giving to the charitable sector. These circles are not formal organizations and so we can support a terrific group with our donations and tax receipting infrastructure. This also helps charity recipients as they get one cheque without the burden of a sudden 150 tax receipts to complete, which can cost a lot of time in processing.

Beyond this, we also administer community-advised funds in Bobcaygeon, Omemee and Fenelon Falls as well as several private family funds, which is a great alternative to having a private foundation. There are some strong tax efficiencies to charitable giving and we help support larger donations that can be directed over time instead of disbursed all at once. These funds include scholarships aimed at local youth or family endowments or planned giving, as directed by the families.