
At our Friends Party this week – an annual event celebrating donors of Community Foundation Boulder County – Jonathan Lev, Executive Director of the Boulder Jewish Community Center (JCC), delivered moving welcoming remarks referencing the tragic, recent shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Leslie Allen, Chair of the Community Foundation’s Board of Trustees, then spoke on the importance of coming together as a community to ensure that ours is an equitable one, where all its residents have access, resources, and opportunity to achieve their full potential.
CEO Jeff Hirota introduced the foundation’s new Strategic Plan, underscoring its emphasis on equity across all sectors and communities throughout Boulder County. To a full house at the JCC, Jeff recalled the foundation’s recent Listening Tour, and the critical need for coming together to skillfully and appropriately respond to our community’s needs…including through the arts.
Kirsten Wilson, Artistic Director of the Motus Theater, a grantee of your Community Foundation.

Kirsten Wilson, Artistic Director of the Motus Theater, a grantee of your Community Foundation.
Stan Garnett – a foundation trustee and former Boulder County DA – and writer/performer Ana Casas, a Leadership Fellows alumna, portray a personal, gripping narrative of deportation … and the inequities in our community that contributed thereto.

Stan Garnett – a foundation trustee and former Boulder County DA – and writer/performer Ana Casas, a Leadership Fellows alumna, portray a personal, gripping narrative of deportation … and the inequities in our community that contributed thereto.
“We are better than our current circumstances,” said Jeff as he returned to the stage. “Indeed, we’ve always been better than our circumstances.”
He went on to describe programs, initiatives, and grantmaking of the Community Foundation that both represent and help define who we are, as a community. Jeff, himself the son of a schoolteacher, also reiterated the foundation’s endorsement of education initiative Amendment 73 through the lens of “the north star of equity.”
“When we think about equity, it’ll take all of us to understand its meaning together, over time,” Jeff concluded. “But I can tell you this – the Community Foundation is dedicated to creating a community in which all are loved.
“No matter how daunting our challenges may seem, everything really can be transformed.”
Read the Community Foundation’s new Strategic Plan.