The Blue Grass Community Foundation was founded in 1967 by a group of Lexington civic leaders led by C.W. and Irene Sulier, who donated the first $1,000 to launch the agency.
Lisa Adkins, who has served as president and CEO of Blue Grass Community Foundation (BGCF) since 2009, feels it’s apt that a single donation by one couple helped launch an organization that, to date, has awarded more than $77.5 million in grants and scholarships to support nonprofits and community engagement initiatives across central and eastern Kentucky.
“What’s interesting is that they were this couple who were not born in Lexington, but they came here and really wanted to give back to their adopted city,” said Adkins. “I think it was their dream to create a place where all people — not just the wealthiest citizens, but all citizens — could give to their community and make a difference.”
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Lisa Adkins of the Blue Grass Community Foundation
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BGCF offices
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The offices of the Blue Grass Community Foundation
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Blue Grass Community Foundation conference space
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Blue Grass Community Foundation headquarters
Today, BGCF continues to strive to be a place where donations both large and small can have an impact. “Anyone can start a charitable fund,” said Adkins. “We work with individuals; we work with families; we work with businesses. We try to position ourselves as the region’s expert on philanthropic giving, and we’re here for the community to serve as a partner in charitable giving.”
As the oldest community foundation in Kentucky, BGCF holds more than $110 million in assets across 535 charitable funds. In fiscal year 2017, the foundation took in more than $28.8 million in charitable donations from more than 6,000 donors and awarded more than $9 million in grants to recipients in Fayette and 31 other Kentucky counties.
Last year’s numbers were record-breaking for the foundation on many fronts, with 156 percent growth in contributions and 35 percent growth in assets over the previous fiscal year, according to BGCF’s 2017 annual report.
“Our work is really about transformation,” said Adkins, who noted that BGCF will hold special events throughout the remainder of this fiscal year to commemorate its 50th anniversary. “We’re focused on building generous, vibrant and engaged communities so that our citizens can have the best quality of life possible.”
BGCF’s impact and scope are hard to miss. From its leadership role in the establishment of Lexington’s popular Legacy Trail walk/bike path to its organization of last spring’s successful On the Table event — which brought more than 11,000 citizens together in small groups to share goals and visions for Lexington’s future — the foundation positions itself not just as a funding agency but, as Adkins put it, also as “a kind of community agenda setter — a convener that can help generate ideas and help move them forward.”
Thanks to the success of the first event, a second On the Table is already scheduled for March 28, 2018. “We view it as an invitation to the community to participate in a conversation about what works in our city, what doesn’t and how we can make Lexington an even better place to live,” Adkins said.
BGCF also recently announced a $100,000 matching grant to launch CivicLex, a nonprofit, non-partisan initiative designed to provide a better understanding of the issues impacting Lexington. The grant will provide four years of support to gather and share information about topical issues and civic processes on a dedicated website, civiclex.org, and to host in-person events.
Because of Lexington’s status as a Knight Foundation community — allowing it to compete for Knight Foundation grants against other communities served by newspapers originally launched by the Knight brothers — BGCF is also an active partner in helping to secure and implement grants that help to improve the city. (In fact, it was a 1994 Knight Foundation grant that allowed Blue Grass Community Foundation to open its first physical office space and hire its first paid staff.)
Since then BGCF has partnered with the Knight Foundation to fund an array of local projects, from support for the North Limestone CDC to SplashJAM, the pop-up summer splash pad at Lexington’s Northeastern Park, to last summer’s Phoenix Forward initiative, which provided games and presented family friendly activities at the downtown Lexington Public Library and Phoenix Park.
“We were really focused on bringing family activities downtown so that people who were coming downtown for the Farmer’s Market would stay and enjoy story time and activities at the library and then maybe grab lunch at a restaurant,” said Anne Donworth, development officer with the Lexington Public Library Foundation. “So the grant could serve as a catalyst for all of downtown.”