Unknown to many, Lincoln Valley Community Foundation Endowment has provided funds for Lincoln since '96

The Lincoln Valley Community Foundation endowment was established in 1996 and provides grants to local nonprofits.

Money for the fund was originally provided as gifts from the Lincoln Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Phelps Dodge Seven Up Pete Joint Venture Mine, according to Jessica Stewart-Kuntz. Stewart-Kuntz is the Vice President of the Montana Community Foundation, which oversees the fund.

The bulk of the money came from the LVCC, which had been raising money to build a new community center for the town. The building would have housed offices for the Chamber as well as a meeting space for organizations and community functions. But by early 1996 the building committee realized donations weren't going to meet the design and constructions costs. That March, plans for the building were scrapped and by that fall LVCC invested $26, 830.43 as seed money for the Lincoln Valley Community Endowment. Phelps Dodge kicked in an additional $10,000.

"It seemed this would be the perfect seed money for an endowment that would take the town into the future," Then-LVCC director and Phelps Dodge Project Manager Mike Schern told the Helena Independent Record in a 1996 story.

The current endowment for the LVCF is $59,000. About 4.5 percent of that gets paid out as a distribution each year that is available for the community to make grants, said Stewart-Kuntz

"Most community foundations have endowments, which is like their community's savings account. That endowment gets a certain amount that is paid out, and that community foundation gets to make grants from the distribution," she said.

While the amount changes year to year, grant funds of about $2,500 are available annually for Lincoln 501(c)3 organizations.

In many communities, when a fund is established, a community foundation is also established to evaluate grants and help distribute the funds. Community foundations are either standalone charitable nonprofits or under the 501(c)3 umbrella of another nonprofit.

"It's a group of people that wants to make a long-term investment in their community, in the causes they care about," noted Stewart-Kuntz, adding, "There is always going to be money coming into the community for nonprofits and causes that are important to the community, because that endowment lasts forever."

MCF serves as the umbrella 501(c)3 organization for many of these community foundations in Montana, but Lincoln hasn't had an established group to serve this purpose since about 2005.

"I know that long before any of us were here, the Montana Community Foundation tried to organize a committee to serve as a community foundation. They struggled to find community members that had the time and capacity to serve on the committee," said Stewart-Kuntz.

A nascent Lincoln Valley Community Foundation was formed and was a beneficiary of the Community Benefit in 2000, but interest waxed and waned. In 2004, the foundation awarded $500 grants to the Lincoln Senior Center, the Upper Blackfoot Valley Historical Society, the Lincoln Park Board, the American Legion and Headwaters Recycling, but ceased to operate as a functioning organization after that, and was never established as an independent non-profit.

From that point, the Helena Area Community Foundation, which was previously called the Lewis and Clark Area Community Foundation, took over the process of making grant recommendations from that fund to Lincoln. However, when the organization changed their name, the general focus of the grants they made also narrowed to the Helena area instead of county-wide, which made the LVCF an outlier.

"A few years ago, when we had a new CEO come on, she decided the community would be better served getting the funds directly to Lincoln. So then our staff started to try to figure out how best to get that money to Lincoln," said Stewart-Kuntz.

In 2016 and 2017, an effort to rebuild a local committee to help oversee grant making failed to gain traction.

"Lincoln's not unique. There are a few funds that have really struggled to get a committee together. Because in small towns, typically the same handful of people do a lot of the nonprofit volunteering," said Stewart-Kuntz.

"We would like to make a grant every year, in the spring," she said, noting that nonprofit 501(c)3 organizations can reach out to staff at MCF, who will then invite them to apply for the grant.

"People can also give to the fund. They can go online to the MCF website and they can give to the Lincoln Valley Community Foundation. That money is there for Lincoln forever. It can't be used for anything else," said Stewart-Kuntz.

In 2016, the BVD found that there hadn't been a substantial donation to Lincoln's endowment since it was created in 1996. Regular donations are 100-percent tax deductible and planned giving, such as charitable trust or annuities, bequests through wills or pooled income funds, can also provide tax benefits.