Giving and voting tools now available
The Community Foundation's Civic Forum has been burning the midnight oil lately to create two new tools that Boulder County people can use to make more informed choices when it comes to giving and voting.
Nonprofit organizations are prohibited from endorsing candidates (including staffers or Trustees associating themselves with their organization while publicly endorsing candidates). So we're not telling anyone who to vote for. Better than that, however, we now have links on our Web site to YouTube videos we shot of every council candidate in the county, answering questions that matter to people who care about local nonprofits.
Our biggest news is that The Community Foundation's biennial Trends Report of Boulder County's social and economic health has hit the streets, and the reviews are positive. As Bob Wells writes at www.boulderreporter.com:
"It’s a study in contrasts, revealing a rather unsightly gap between the wealthy and the struggling, most of the latter group being our Latino population.
Fountain of revealing statistics. The county as a whole boasted a 2008 median family income of $85,000 (Boulder’s was $91,000). Real estate was pricey in Boulder ($538,000 median home price), much cheaper elsewhere ($220,000 in Longmont). Of the 294,000 of us in the county, 13 percent were Latino – double the percentage of 1990 (Boulder itself is 9 percent Latino). Our population is aging: 12 percent are over 60 now but that number’s projected to rise to 20% by 2020. The poor have lousy access to mental-health counseling and to affordable child care. Eleven percent of residents and 5 percent of families are living below the federally defined poverty level.
Other statistics abound in the 70-page report: 2 percent of us drive hybrid cars; 67 percent of us drive to work alone in our cars, only 9 percent of us walk or bike to work. We have a high concentration of artists here, but they only earn, on average, $20,000 a year.
Achievement gap. The Trends report’s most striking finding was of a continuing “Achievement Gap” between white and Latino kids, reflected in a sharp divergence in school test scores. That’s why the Community Foundation last year launched an Early Childhood Initiative, directing money from its unrestricted grant-making fund, the Community Trust, to preschool education for what they’re calling the “gap kids.” The first step in this initiative was $90,000 given this summer to a then-struggling program called Providers Advancing School Outcomes (PASO).
For all its wealth, Boulder County’s a bit laggard in its support of philanthropic causes, explained Community Foundation President Josie Heath. Why? The reasons they’ve identified include inaccurate perceptions that nonprofits spend too much on administration (they don’t) and that the County’s needs are small (they aren’t), plus a lack of connectedness to the community among many.
The Foundation’s directors and staff are excited to be able, through the Early Childhood Initiative, to direct a good piece of their $5 million in total annual grants to the “gap kids,” which the Trends report highlights as perhaps our biggest social ill. In Chris Barge’s words: “We’re starting with the kids.”
Go to www.boulderreporter.com for videos of myself and Civic Forum Director Morgan Rogers ("Who in Boulder is more of a dynamo than Morgan Rogers?" writes Wells) explaining more. And please swing by The Community Foundation, 1123 Spruce St., to pick up your own copy. The entire Trends report will also be available online later this week, at www.commfound.org.
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