“The staff and leadership at the Community Foundation is where you should always go first. They really understand the issues, the organizations working to address those issues, and what it means to collaborate.”
Robin Luff’s association with the Community Foundation started by word-of-mouth.
“I served on several boards before serving on the foundation board, and all I’d ever hear about is the good work happening at the Community Foundation,” she says. “Everyone I knew wanted to be a close ally of the foundation.”
So when Robin retired from the board of Impact on Education – a grantee of the foundation’s Community Trust fund – she served on the Community Foundation’s Board of Trustees for “wonderful years together,” and further volunteered on Community Trust committees. “Going through funding applications was really valuable,” she says.
Another foundation initiative important to Robin is our work to strengthen school readiness, and to advance preschool education for every child in Boulder County. “Previously, preschool was just for families who could pay for it,” recalls Robin. “We found everyone working in that arena to identify how we could work together. In the end, we launched a campaign that resulted in a ballot initiative. That was a big win.”
Indeed, the ballot initiative resulted in doubling the availability of preschool and full-day Kindergarten countywide.
Robin went on to make a difference for our county by supporting ELPASO, and by contributing her expertise to the foundation’s seminal TRENDS Report. For TRENDS, she contributed her research know-how and marketing muscle early on to ensure an attractive, well-reported biennial publication that has since become a trusted, widely-read resource for informed decision-making across all sectors, countywide.
“It was a long process for everyone involved at the time, deciding what to cover, whom we would interview, how the magazine should be laid out, and so on,” Robin continues. “And it just keeps getting better every year. I think of it as one-stop-shopping when you want really good information about what’s happening in our community.”
Adds Robin, “The staff and leadership at the Community Foundation is where you should always go first. They really understand the issues, the organizations working to address those issues, and what it means to collaborate.
“Working with the Community Foundation is a fun partnership that’s very near and dear to my heart.”
Related:
Boulder County TRENDS Report: webinar
