School Foundation Building School Foundation Building
The Rural School and Community Trust’s Center for Midwestern Initiatives recognizes the vital role a thriving school foundation can play in the life of a rural community. In partnership with a community foundation or as a stand-alone institution, school foundations provide much needed funding support, engage community members and relocated alumni with the school, and promote meaningful partnerships.
Supporters Form Valley Springs Foundation
- Last Updated on May 15, 2012
- Written by CMI Staff
Eleven people have come together to form the Valley Springs Foundation, whose purpose is to provide financial resources and support to enrich and enhance the quality of education for all Valley Springs School students and enrich the quality of life in the Valley Springs community.
On Tuesday evening, April 24, the group met to officially constitute themselves as a board, approve bylaws, elect officers, set dates for future meetings, appoint members to a Fund Development Committee and a Communications Committee, and approve the signing of a fund document for Community Foundation of the Ozarks of Springfield, MO, to house and invest the funds generated by the newly formed foundation. The collaboration with Community Foundation of the Ozarks (CFO) is enabled by the relationship between Rural Community Alliance and its Valley Springs chapter, the Rural School and Community Trust, and CFO.
Board members of the Valley Springs Foundation are Rodney Arnold, Betsy Cash, Karena DeYoung, Lavina Grandon, Sarah Hough, Rachel Norton, Wes Phifer, Sarita Sisco, Janet Thomason, Judy White, and Faye Yarbrough. Ex Officio members are Charles and Sandra Trammell.
Arkansas Advocates Discuss Foundation Building
- Last Updated on March 20, 2012
- Written by CMI Staff
Imagine losing your town’s school when board members from the larger community in your consolidated school district simply decide through nefarious majority vote to close it. Then consider the same school board won’t allow your town to use the building for a preschool or community center, due to the larger town’s fear that you and other local parents may rally and apply for Charter School status. Sound like the plot of a Hollywood backwoods, mystery thriller—replete with villains, a forbidden inter-village love interest, broken hearts, and an ultimate hero? No. Welcome to rural Arkansas, where the state’s school consolidation policy forces small school districts with declining enrollments to bargain with the Devil in hopes of keeping community schools open, with the all-too-often dim hope of preventing young children from spending hours on a bus. It is hard to say what former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who drove the consolidation issue, hoped to accomplish, but questions along that line will have to be referred to Fox News. Anyway, castigating former governors and Presidential wannabes accomplishes little.
Instead, small towns in Arkansas are rolling up their sleeves and devising thoughtful strategies for survival and community improvement. Small rural places need to develop social and economic capital through the development of a sturdy three-legged stool: building strong schools, rethinking community and economic development, and devising strategies to maximize philanthropic support. Arkansas’ Rural Community Alliance (RCA) is committed to these three goals, and their recent workshop in Alpena on school and community foundation building served to further their work.
Wisconsin Farm Is Home for Thriving Rural Foundation
- Last Updated on March 15, 2012
- Written by CMI Staff
“If a man can’t be happy on a little farm in Wisconsin, he hasn’t the makings of happiness in his soul.”
--An oft-quoted remark by farmer and folk artist, Nick Engelbert, 1881-1962
This is the story of how a little farm in Wisconsin became the focus for a grassroots rural organization's cause. Nick Engelbert was born in Austria in 1881 and immigrated to America to escape military service in the Austro-Hungarian army. He married a Swiss immigrant (Katherine Thoni) in 1913, and nine years later they bought a small seven-acre farm near the village of Hollandale, Wisconsin.
Engelbert farmed and raised four children on his small acreage, but he is known today for his unique sculptures and mosaic-laden house that together became a sort of wacky tourist destination after World War II.
Engelbert eventually left his farm after his wife’s passing in 1960 and died two years later. Little could he have realized his work would leave a legacy for creativity and philanthropy.
The Engelbert farm and its unique and evocative art work eventually fell into disrepair. Fortunately, Wisconsin’s Kohler Foundation, an organization committed to preserving art and sculpture of “self-taught artists,” purchased the property in 1991 and restored the farm and many of the salvageable sculptures.
Over the next four years numerous meetings were held between Kohler Foundation representatives and community members from the Hollandale region, part of the Pecatonica school district. In 1996, the Pecatonica Educational Charitable Foundation was formally established and the Engelbert farm, known as the “Grandview” property—the name of the Engelbert dairy, was transferred from the Kohler Foundation to the newly-formed organization.
Read more: Wisconsin Farm Is Home for Thriving Rural Foundation