Minnesota Council on Foundations Blog – Philanthropy Potluck

Bill King, MCF president, recently wrote a guest blog entry for The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers. Posted here is an excerpt from his full post, which you can find in its entirety at the Forum’s Forum.

MCF has been privileged to receive two grants from the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers initiative, The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers.

With our first grant, we led a collaboration of key philanthropic partners in developing the Minnesota Toolkit for Giving and a corresponding website, minnesotagiving.org.  These resources provide donors with information on a wide range of charitable giving options, ranging from simply writing a check to support a favored charity to making more complex decisions on creating a private foundation or setting up a fund at a community foundation.  Created in 2001, the website continues to garner attention and had 31,000 unique visits in 2009.

Our second New Ventures-supported project focused on Minnesota’s long-held tradition of corporate giving and its nationally known 5% Club.  Concerned with waves of mergers and acquisitions resulting in the loss of many home-grown businesses and their contributions to communities, we designed this project to take the concept of percent giving and apply it to smaller businesses in rural communities.  From our experience with the 5% Club, we knew this would only be successful if conducted through established business associations – the Chambers of Commerce.

Now called Minnesota Business Gives and housed at the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, this project has led to 36 community chambers across the state recognizing their business members for giving at least 2%.  In addition, each chamber has conducted a seminar on giving strategies for businesses; 17 seminars were delivered in 2009 alone. We also developed two publications, The Minnesota Business Giving and Community Involvement Workbook (modeled on workbooks created by the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers and the Oregon Community Foundation) and Giving Stories…

> Post continued at the Forum’s Forum

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 7:20 am and is filed under promotion of philanthropy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.