Help for the Heartland

Daniel Johnson, for the Chronicle

Svetlana Pushkareva Hutfles sits at attention as one after another of the community-foundation leaders she’s gathered here in a conference room at the city’s Epic Center tell their stories of success.

Elizabeth Weese, who has led Dickinson County’s community foundation since February, delivers big news: A donor has underwritten her organization’s operating expenses for the next few years with a $500,000 gift and on top of that made two $1 million pledges to the local hospice and library.

“I am so glad this came during my tenure,” Weese deadpans. Her peers laugh, knowing the gifts probably took years of cultivation.

Many of the other stories, though, highlight more modest accomplishments. Hutfles, executive director of the Kansas Association of Community Foundations, eagerly listens to those, too. It helps her serve them better, she says: “It’s important for me to hear what they’re proud of — but also what they’re dealing with.”

And so the stories unfold of small improvements in places largely ignored by big private foundations: In a town of 1,400 in central Kansas, with no grocery store or school, a group of local residents has pledged to spend the next year in conversation about the community’s future. Another community fund recently helped find a new owner for a local grocery store that was slated to close. A food pantry opened at a school and started providing bottled water, once organizers learned that some students don’t have running water at home.

Through it all, Hutfles chimes in with praise and practical advice about how to advance even small gains. In conversation later that afternoon, though, she expresses dismay at how few national grant makers offer support to rural communities like those she and her members serve. To some degree, Hutfles suggests, a wide cultural gap between those communities and many urban grant makers could play a role: “They might think rural isn’t ‘sexy.’”

Nineteen percent of Americans live in rural areas, but less than 6 percent of private grant making goes there, according to the Foundation Center. “Sometimes people forget that the rural areas provide a lot to cities: We grow their food,” says Bekki Pribil, the Kansas association’s board chair and head of the South Central Community Foundation. “If rural America were to die, the cities aren’t going to last.”

‘A Force of Nature’

Hutfles, 42, knows exactly what she and the mostly rural charities she serves are up against. Since 2009, when she was named the first full-time executive director of her organization, she’s been leading an effort to help the state’s small philanthropies form, affiliate, and grow.

A native of Togliatti, Russia, Hutfles is a community-philanthropy scholar who wound up in Kansas after marrying a Midwesterner.

The community-foundation association she leads now has 94 members, up from 46 when she started; 97 percent of all community funds in the state belong. The membership’s combined assets have grown from $1.4 billion in 2010 to $3.6 billion in 2017, with grant making up from $260 million to $397 million during the same period.

Five years ago, Hutfles spearheaded the creation of Keep 5 in Kansas, the state’s version of a widespread push to capture a sliver of inheritable wealth for local philanthropy before those assets are distributed to far-flung heirs. Great wealth rests in the farms and businesses throughout the state: About $79 billion has been projected to flow from estates by decade’s end, according to a 2012 study by researchers at Wichita State University.

Three years ago, Hutfles and a team of advisers rebranded her organization’s annual state conference to serve growing community foundations around the country, aiming to fill a void left after the Council on Foundations stopped running its community-foundation-centered national conference. Now, each October, community-fund leaders from around the country converge on Wichita to swap ideas. Last year, more than 320 people from 32 states attended.

This year, her organization released a new online-learning program, CF Express Training, aimed at helping community-foundation boards and employees acquire skills.

“She’s kind of a force of nature,” says Steve Alley, a strategic-management consultant for nonprofits in Tucson and a former community-foundation head who serves on the advisory board for the national conference in Kansas. “When she sees something that needs to be done, she does it.”

The word “tireless” comes up a lot when others speak of Hutfles. “She’s a tireless champion” for Kansas and rural philanthropy, says Brad Ward, director of community philanthropy at the Council on Foundations. “She’s really starting to put together in her mind what is a winning aspiration for rural community foundations, starting with what do they need to be confident and able community builders.”

Pribil also vouches for Hutfles’s energy. “When you believe in the mission, then you can work tirelessly to help achieve those goals,” the board chair says. “And I do believe she works tirelessly.”

A Hometown Built From Scratch

Hutfles, who moved to Kansas in 2007, grew up during the Soviet Union’s final years, in Togliatti, a city on the Volga River dominated by auto plants. Her parents first connected through their work: Her mother, Tatiana, and father, Vladimir, both worked at a car factory. Her mother ran an electrical-switching system inside the plant, her father, an engineer, ran the department that managed the plant’s water and electricity.

“My parents’ generation who came to Togliatti pretty much built that town from scratch,” she says. “It was populated by people who were entrepreneurial enough to come to a land of nothing and build a brand-new city.

“It is not surprising that the first community foundation in Russia was established there and that my generation, raised by such innovative parents, isn’t scared to try new things.”

Wendy Skellenger/Hutchinson Community Foundation

As a student, she was asked to help translate a meeting by officials from major American nonprofits (including the Ford, Charles Stewart Mott, and Charities Aid foundations) aimed at helping create Russia’s first community philanthropy.

It was an alien concept to Hutfles and to other Russians after the collapse of the Soviet regime.

“Here we were speaking about volunteering, when volunteerism was mandatory under communism,” she recalls. “Here we were speaking about sharing resources when people were still in that stage of acquiring resources, when the national resources were up for grabs.”

She grasped that a community foundation allowed ordinary people to mobilize their own resources: “You don’t need to wait for the state or federal government to make change. You can give the power back to people to make change today, for tomorrow, forever. I knew I had to learn more.”

So she joined a team that, in 1998, started a community foundation in her hometown, still run by its founder, Boris Tsyrulnikov. She attained a master’s degree in international studies at the University of Leeds, where she did her thesis on community philanthropy, and worked at the Transatlantic Community Foundations Network, the Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support, and the Global Fund for Community Foundations.

The work frequently brought her to the United States, including to Kansas. She’s been visiting America since 1990, when she came as a 14-year-old in a student-exchange program, seeing Chicago, New York, and Washington. The trip gave her an early introduction to rural America: “I got to do archaeology in the cornfields of Illinois.”

Her background and her fluent but Russian-accented English can pose both advantages and challenges as she travels around the American Midwest. “On the one hand, people remember you, which is good for business. People are curious. So you always have a reason to talk to somebody,” she says. “And Kansans are a very welcoming people. I have met kindness and genuine support.”

On the other hand, she adds, “I recognize I might always be a foreigner in Kansas. But I know I’m dedicated to the future of the state, and this country, and I hope that’s what I’m judged on.”

Fuel for Growth

Like several states in the Midwest, Kansas has endured decades of large numbers of people moving from its small communities. Many towns have lost their schools, their churches, their grocery stores, and their economic vitality.

“For rural communities, the needs just continue to grow,” says Aubrey Abbott Patterson, an association board member who led the group before Hutfles was hired. “The communities are going to be looking to us more and more for help.”

The Kansas Association of Community Foundations started in 2005 as a program at the Hutchinson Community Foundation, aimed at helping to organize the state’s community organizations. Patterson, then a new program officer at Hutchinson and now its president, was assigned to oversee the fledgling association. The size of the task became apparent quickly.

“My board thought I was spending 10 percent of my time on it, but I was really spending 50 percent,” she says.

The association’s efforts dovetailed with a push by the Kansas Health Foundation to help boost community grant makers.

“There were a lot of community foundations in Kansas, but a lot of them were not functioning well, A lot formed for a project — a swimming pool, a senior center,” says Jeff Usher, senior program officer at Kansas Health. “And now that they had founded that project, they were floundering in some way.”

Beginning in 2002, Kansas Health committed $60 million in total for two decade-long programs, known as Grow I and Grow II, which provided management assistance and fundraising incentives like matching grants to help the organizations build their assets. The 39 community foundations that participated in Grow II built their endowments from $236 million, when the program started in 2009, to nearly $700 million today.

As Patterson’s workload on behalf of the Kansas Association of Community Foundations grew, its board decided to hire a full-time executive director in 2009. The Kansas Health Foundation, Usher says, chipped in $700,000 in support, seeking to secure more individualized assistance for Grow II participants than the consultants his group hired could provide.

Enter Hutfles, a Russian émigré with deep experience in community philanthropy.

“We thought, this can’t be real. But we interviewed her and she was by far the best candidate,” says Usher, who served on the hiring committee with Patterson. “It was a no-brainer.”

In her job interview, he says, Hutfles talked about “trying to regionalize how community foundations work together.” Her strategy, Usher says, has proved successful.

“What it does is keep Kansas on the cutting edge of what local place-based philanthropy communities can do, whether urban or rural,” he says. “It helps us, the Kansas Health Foundation. We’ve learned from it.”

Making a Quilt

One of the things Hutfles is proudest of is her organization’s role in breaking down feelings of isolation among its members and strengthening their identity as Kansas grant makers. Meetings like the one at the Epic Center have also helped dissolve feelings of competition among the community foundations, she says. The emphasis is on self-determination: The groups determine how and when to form affiliations to consolidate their resources and multiply their impact.

“Philanthropy in rural areas can be pretty lonely,” says Patterson, who is now a board member of the association. “If you’re serving your community well, it’s a tough job. It’s a lot of hours. The association allows that connection and leaning in on each other.”

The association, Hutfles says, is trying to weave its members into the “patchwork American quilt,” as she calls it, of community foundations around the country, connecting them to services they can share or learn from, such as a legal help desk run by the Indiana Philanthropy Alliance or advocacy expertise gleaned from the Council of Michigan Foundations.

The organization’s annual Conference for Growing Community Foundations, put together with help from consultants Gabriel Works and Diane Miller and an advisory board with members from around the country, aims to give even the smallest groups practical takeaways. “We ask our speakers to go down to the trenches, keep it very how-to,” Hutfles says. “We need details.”

Theresa Hearn, head of the Derby Community Foundation, was a public-relations professional with no fundraising experience when she was recruited in 2004 by the founders of her organization.

The Derby fund started out with $80,000, and the founders’ vision was narrow, says Hearn: “They were all about art and trees and sidewalks.” Now, thanks to what she and her board learned from the Kansas association about cultivating donors (and participation in Grow II), the fund has $2 million in assets and is running its first endowment campaign.

“I’m a believer,” says Hearn, a former board chair of the association who will give a presentation with a peer from the Twin Cities area at this October’s conference.

She appreciates the nuts-and-bolts focus of the association’s programming. “People say, You have to find out what a donor is passionate about,” she says. “But how? KACF taught me the ‘how.’”

Along with CFUnited, a biannual gathering of affinity groups that launched last March, the Kansas group’s October conference “fills a niche: How do we talk about the very basic issues of community foundations,” says Ward, of the Council on Foundations. “They’re doing it well.”

The conference and the new Express Training modules are intended not only to help support and educate community grant makers but also to develop into revenue-generating enterprises.

Financial sustainability is the number-one challenge her organization faces now, according to Hutfles and others close to the organization. The Kansas Health Foundation’s association’s commitment to annual $200,000 grants for operating support runs out in 2020, and Usher says Hutfles’s organization will have to build up other sources of revenue.

The foundation’s grant, Usher says, “doesn’t come close to supporting all the technical assistance [the association] is providing.”

Impact Investing

After sharing their success stories at the Epic Center conference, participants yield the floor to Patterson and the day’s emcee, Yazmin Wood, head of the Legacy Regional Community Foundation, who take up the subject of impact investing.

Using nonprofit assets for loans aimed at furthering a social-change mission might be old news for the risk-taking one-percenters from Wall Street or Silicon Valley. But for community foundations built on the wealth of frugal farmers and other small entrepreneurs, impact investing is a novelty.

Patterson tells of how the Hutchinson Community Foundation got funds from a local bank and the state to make a $200,000 loan to a nonprofit to help it build affordable housing.

She’d like to see her group devote up to 5 percent of its assets to such investments and urges her peers to put some of their money into economic development too.

“All of us should be thinking about it,” Patterson tells her colleagues. “It could turn so many things in Kansas around. And if we’re truly moving in that way, maybe we can bring others along with us.”

After her passionate presentation, Patterson fields questions: What guarantees do you have of repayment? Can you come speak to my board? Is there a TED Talk about this I could watch?

Hutfles chimes in, “This is fairly new, but we believe this is the future of the sector.” And she breaks some news: The Kansas Health Foundation has just awarded a grant to NetWork Kansas, a clearinghouse on business-development information, to help the state’s community foundations explore impact investing.

The discussion exemplifies Hutfles’s vision for her association: to lead community-foundation officials beyond the basics into bigger conversations about their shared future.

Says the association leader: “We’re determined to continue lifting up emerging, overarching, or acute topics for the field — the 2020 Census, equity, economic investment, and others that years ago would not necessarily have been on a community foundation’s radar.”

All three of those topics were on the agenda for last month’s conference.

How Kansas Community Foundations Have Grown