The Crescent City Farmers Market lets New Orleans' urban consumers access the best that the rural farms and fisheries have to offer.
Aroostook County is one of the 10 counties currently served by Maine Community Foundation's County Program.
The New Hampshire Community Foundation's Federation system set out to delicately balance a set of equally important values—local control, statewide clout and good old-fashioned New England thrift.
Rural Service Case Stories
Use the links below to access brief sketches of community foundations that exemplify each of the six coverage structures introduced in Covering Rural Territory: A Framework of Rural Service Structures for Community Foundations. These case stories take you beneath the generalities, describing exactly how one foundation has sustained its Federation model, why another maintains a Consolidated Service model, or the mechanisms that keep a Service Bureau model serving.
Not every case story demonstrates an unqualified success. But we learn by trying things out, and we learn by seeing what others have done before us. In this way, perhaps we can avoid the same pitfalls, and enjoy some shortcuts.
Each case story addresses similar topics for each foundation—mission, service area, vital statistics about the foundation and the region, structure highlights, operations and governance, grantmaking, endowment building, keys to success, lessons learned, advice to others considering or using this rural service structure, and contact information for the foundation profiled.
- Consolidated Service: Greater New Orleans Foundation
- Area Fund: Maine Community Foundation
- Federation: New Hampshire Charitable Foundation
- Service Bureau: Nebraska Community Foundation
- Incubator: Humboldt (CA) Area Foundation
- Partnership: Upper Valley Community Foundation
Additional examples
Other examples of community foundations representing each structure, along with links to their websites, include:
- Consolidated Service: Vermont Community Foundation
- Area Fund: South Dakota Community Foundation
- Area Fund: East Tennessee Foundation
- Area Fund: CREATE Foundation
- Federation: Arizona Community Foundation
- Federation: Arkansas Community Foundation
- Service Bureau: North Carolina Community Foundation
- Incubator: Community Foundation of the Ozarks (MO)
- Incubator: Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
- Incubator: Lilly Foundation GIFT program (private)
Rural Development Philanthropy Learning Learning Network
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