When Locals Lead Grant Making: 20 Years of Results From Colorado

In rural Edwards, Colo., Michelle Hartel, who leads the nonprofit Mountain Youth, has seen a significant uptick in mental-health and substance-use issues among adolescents over the past decade. Those growing needs have often outpaced her ability to raise funds.

Edwards is a rural town that, like many in a state dotted with ski resorts and stunning national parks, is supported by tourism and recreation. It is a 15-minute drive from Vail, one of the country’s premier ski areas with a tony Alpine-esque village that draws wealthy people from around the world.

But the fairy dust from all that glitz and glitter doesn’t float down to the residents of working-class Edwards, where many rely on the low-paying, service-oriented, sometimes seasonal jobs that support the resort economy. They struggle to find affordable housing and child care, and many parents must work multiple jobs to make ends meet, leaving adolescents on their own after school, when they are more likely to get into trouble.

In Colorado, rural groups like Mountain Youth struggle to attract attention from big grant makers clustered in the state’s populous urban areas. It’s a common problem among rural nonprofits across the country. Few grant makers are based in rural areas, and according to estimates, just 3 to 7 percent of foundation funding goes to nonprofits in rural places even though as much as 20 percent of the population lives there.

Things changed for Mountain Youth in 2020 when the group landed a five-year grant totaling nearly $420,000 through the Regional Partnerships program at the El Pomar Foundation, a $711 million grant maker in Colorado Springs.

“With this support, we were really able to ramp up the services we provide,” says Hartel. “Not only did the funding itself give us the opportunity to try out a few different expansion and evolution aspects of our programming but having those five years to invest in our organization helped set the stage to be more sustainable.”

Thanks to El Pomar’s grant, the number of middle schoolers served by Mountain Youth’s life-skills programs increased from 375 to more than 950 during the five-year grant cycle, and participants in its program for families with middle schoolers more than doubled to over 100. Across several measures the group uses, mental health among the young people it serves improved.

El Pomar’s approach stands out because it enlists local leaders to guide funding decisions, a structure that enables the foundation to better support organizations in rural parts of the state.

It has created 11 councils that include some combination of lawmakers, college presidents, local charity and business leaders, teachers, and others with a nuanced understanding of their region’s challenges. That makes them better equipped than El Pomar’s leaders to know what people in their communities need to thrive. Each council can recommend up to $250,000 in annual grants, and El Pomar gives each regional council member $10,000 to donate to one or two local charities of their choice.

Since launching the program in 2003, El Pomar has tripled the number of rural grants it awards, and the amount of money it gives to nonprofits in rural parts of Colorado grew by 86 percent compared with the previous two decades.

“Each community is a little different, so being able to have this broad network of people across the whole state is effective because it allows multiple voices from different regions to inform us,” says Maureen Lawrence, who leads El Pomar’s program. “We could have hired program officers to go out there, but by having people that are living in the regions and already have those deep networks, it’s a really rich source of information that enhances the quality and effectiveness of the grants we’re able to do in those areas.”

A More Effective Model

The program’s impact has been important not only because of how it has helped families in places like Edwards but also because it addresses the significant economic and philanthropic disparities throughout Colorado.

The Denver metro area, for example, has 55 grant makers with $100 million or more in assets, whereas Eagle County, where Edwards is located, has one, and Edwards has only eight grant makers with $10 million or more in assets.

The program also addresses big disparities in Colorado’s population. Ninety percent of Colorado’s nearly 6 million people live in Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver, and other metropolitan parts of the state’s Front Range. Yet nearly three-quarters of the state’s counties are considered rural or frontier counties with fewer economic opportunities and limited access to health care and other services.

“There is a challenge in getting money out to these rural communities because the Front Range is going to be more populated and there’s more organizations representing the Front Range,” says Jason Machado, a senior instructor at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Affairs. “But [El Pomar’s] model has proven effective because they’re getting money out to the rural communities, which historically was not happening.”

The geographic distance between foundations and rural communities is significant in many states with large rural areas, and it presents challenges for many grant makers, regardless of what state they are in, says Dreama Gentry, CEO of Partners for Rural Impact, a Berea, Ky., nonprofit that aids youths in rural communities. El Pomar’s program, she says, provides an approach that could work elsewhere.

“What I like about this model is that it’s got local people thinking about their own region and local groups of people making the decisions and [a foundation] investing in them to make decisions,” Gentry says.

Support from the councils has been crucial for some grantees, who have expanded their programs and services, while others have used their grant money to take on research efforts that have helped them understand how to reach more people in need.

A $23,000 grant in 2022 enabled the Center for Restorative Programs, a small group in rural Alamosa, Colo., to conduct research on how to help young people with mental-health and substance-abuse problems who are caught up in the criminal-justice system. The charity, which works to curb recidivism, used the grant to pay for new assessment tools and to help it learn about groups with similar missions and bring staff from those groups to Alamosa to work with the center’s staff.

The organization is now better at evaluating the needs of young people, and it can better connect them to more meaningful resources, says Luke Yoder, the nonprofit’s executive director.

Reaching Every County

El Pomar’s leaders created the Regional Partnerships program after growing concerned that the foundation was failing to live up to the mandate laid out in 1937 by the group’s founders, Spencer and Julie Penrose: to improve the lives of all Colorado residents, not just those in metropolitan areas.

When it comes to choosing council members, foundation officials and existing council members look for volunteers who have a track record of strong community involvement or expertise in a specific area.

“We look for people who can think regionally about the needs of their area and have broad networks. We recognize these individuals may not alone have the knowledge that’s helpful on a particular issue, but they likely have a network they can lean on to gather more information when needed,” says Lawrence, the Regional Partnerships program director.

Larry Zaragoza, town manager of La Jara, in the south-central part of the state, was asked to join El Pomar’s San Luis Valley Regional Council in 2017. It covers six mostly rural counties, including several of the poorest counties in the state, and focuses much of its grant making on addressing youth mental health and resiliency.

Zaragoza taught high school and coached track for four decades. Along the way, he became a confidant of his students, many of whom came from financially strapped single-parent homes or were being raised by grandparents because their parents had died, were incarcerated, or were battling drug addiction. In recent years, he has seen students struggling with depression, feelings of isolation, and suicidal ideation.

“I was very reluctant because I thought, ‘Well, how am I going to fit in with a retired judge, a college president, a local commissioner,’ but I was convinced by a couple of our council members that even though my background wasn’t similar to theirs, I still had a lot to offer,” Zaragoza says. “So I told myself, ‘Larry, you get to give away other people’s money to help people, to help organizations. Take this chance.’”

Councils don’t operate alone. El Pomar trustees and staff visit each council to help its members identify and assess local nonprofits and act as a liaison between the councils and foundation leaders. The foundation also assigns a trustee or two to each region to guide council members as they work through the process, says Dave Palenchar, El Pomar’s board chairman, who was COO during the Regional Partnerships program’s first year.

“Trustees are kind of walking along with the council members not to say this is what you ought to do but to point out where there might be some pitfalls in what they’re thinking,” Palenchar says. “It’s not like we’re leaving these individual councils in a vacuum to come up with something and then all of a sudden drop it on the foundation and say we would like you to support this.”

One Grant Can Attract More Grants

For many grantees, El Pomar has been very supportive, often in ways that are unlike other big grant makers.

A lot of foundations don’t understand rural communities and have a tendency to barge in thinking they know how to solve local problems without taking the time to talk to people who live there, says Paul Major, who led the Telluride Foundation, a Colorado community foundation, for 22 years. It received a $76,750 grant through the Regional Partnerships program in 2007 to support and expand a dental-health program for children and several additional grants totaling $75,000 for the dental program in later years. Major’s experiences working with the council and El Pomar leadership was different.

“Most foundations, they come in and they go, ‘I got the money, you guys got the problem, we’re all going to sit down and do a strategic plan and we’re going to tell you how to solve it,’ and that’s how it goes,” Major says. “When El Pomar shows up, they have enough respect for a community to listen very carefully. They don’t just come in and select the usual suspects. They look for real people that could really represent the community.”

El Pomar is well known enough among the state’s grant makers that one grant can help groups attract more funding. The Telluride Foundation ended up getting about $50,000 from an individual to expand the dental-health program because the donor was impressed the organization had received El Pomar money, Major says. When the Center for Restorative Programs launched a fundraising campaign to move to a bigger space, Yoder, the group’s executive director, says showing that the charity was an El Pomar grantee added to its trustworthiness.

“To be able to say we are a trusted partner of this respected entity in our state, that’s something that lent us some credibility as we were seeking funds from other foundations, especially when we were growing from that really grassroots phase to a more institutionalized phase,” Yoder says.

Getting a Regional Partnerships grant from El Pomar gives charity leaders something else: leadership training and connections to their peers in other organizations throughout their regions and the state.

The foundation holds small gatherings for each region’s grantees and brings council members to Colorado Springs each year for a big statewide conference. The events include leadership workshops for nonprofit heads, and they connect council members with their counterparts from other regions and provide grantees with time to meet one another. Grantees say meeting peers in person is a valuable part of the program.

“The work we do in our communities is each pretty unique to our organizations,” says Hartel. “There’s not another group doing the work Mountain Youth is doing here in our community, but there might be a similar group in the next county over, so El Pomar creating the environment for us to share what we’ve learned — to not make the same mistakes as each other and be able to replicate what is working — is super helpful.”

Thanks to its regional council model, more rural nonprofits know about the foundation and are applying for grants on their own. And it has deepened El Pomar’s relationship with the rural communities it sought to reach when it started the program two decades ago.

“We don’t go out with a big three-by-five-foot check and get a photo opportunity and then they see us maybe three or four years later; that’s not the approach that we’ve taken,” says Palenchar, El Pomar’s chairman. “By being out there repetitively it just reinforces the fact that we’re there to be part of their community and we want to be as supportive as we can be for as long as we can be.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.