How a new foundation made its mark
How a New Foundation Made Its Mark
I. GETTING INVOLVED: A NEW COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FINDS A CAUSE
The Park City Foundation (PCF) is a new community foundation created in 2007. Park City, Utah, is a small ski resort town with a close-knit community of residents who care deeply about preserving both the beauty of their natural surroundings and the town’s profitable snow-based tourist attractions. From the very beginning, PCF leaders knew they wanted to do more than simply steward local donors’ funds—they wanted the foundation to tackle important, pressing needs. Since the potential effects of climate change are significant in a community so economically dependent on snowfall, environmental preservation seemed like a promising area in which to invest time and resources.
PCF was just getting started when the Knight Foundation announced its first KCIC grant competition in 2008. The foundation’s Executive Director Trisha Worthington explains that she didn’t think PCF had much of a shot at winning, but took a chance anyway. “We decided that since we were so new, we would go for it—not thinking that we would ever be considered. But we figured we would learn something from the process and get out in the community.”
Learning about Community Information Needs
PCF used the KCIC application process to jump-start its strategy. Worthington and her colleagues requested meetings with leaders from the local media and city government to deepen their understanding of existing information needs in the community. These meetings led to a partnership with the city to inform residents about ways they could take action to fight climate change, which, in turn, evolved into the high-impact project that PCF undertook when it later won a KCIC grant. With the grant funds, PCF developed a new climate-focused web site, ParkCityGreen.org, in partnership with Park City Municipal (the Mayor’s office), and mounted a concurrent public event in partnership with Park City Mountain Resort, Save Our Snow II, to raise awareness and inspire action around climate issues.
II. BEYOND THE PROJECT: FOUNDATION LEADERSHIP
As a brand new community foundation, PCF was looking for ways to help address important issues facing Park City, while also establishing itself as an important community resource that had credibility with and visibility among other local institutions and leaders. Through SOS II and ParkCityGreen.org, PCF successfully galvanized prominent local political, business and nonprofit leaders around the cause of environmental preservation and parlayed their involvement into community-wide projects that engaged thousands of local residents in the issue. Its success with these programs allowed PCF, in only its third year of operation, to broaden its scope of impact to include conducting research and disseminating information on a broad range of vital local issues including health, education and the economy as well as the environment. PCF’s information and media initiative opened up partnership opportunities with other local institutions and established the foundation as an active presence in the community. Let’s examine more closely the ways in which PCF enhanced its leadership in the community and empowered its residents to address the environmental and economic threat of climate change. Project Description: ParkCityGreen.org: A Hyper-Local Portal for Environmental Action
ParkCityGreen.org is a new online forum designed to help local residents learn about ways they could personally participate in and contribute to environmental preservation. While numerous websites already provided users with generic tools to calculate their carbon footprint or practice energy saving ideas, ParkCityGreen.org is unique because it was wholly Park City-centric. For instance, visitors to the site can calculate their carbon footprint based on data about their actual local energy providers, whereas other sites only extrapolated the information based on national averages. The site also provides residents with information on federal, state, and local rebates and tax incentives to reduce users’ carbon footprint. The specificity of the suggestions and information to the Park City context make the information compelling and actionable.Save Our Snow II: Raising Public Awareness and Commitment to the Cause
At the same time as PCF was developing ParkCityGreen.org with the Mayor’s office, the foundation was working with Park City Mountain Resort to mount a highly-visible city-wide event, Save Our Snow II. The event was designed to inspire residents to take action to prevent climate change and learn about its potential impact on Park City’s economy. Save Our Snow II built on momentum generated by the first Save Our Snow event, organized two and a half years before. The first event had been organized by the local public radio station, KPCW, in partnership with Park City Mountain Resort and led to an increased understanding among community members of the science and impact of climate change.
Save Our Snow II went beyond the original event by including segments that vividly illustrated the economic impacts of climate change on Park City, such as calculating the economic impact of losing just one ski day. The timing of Save our Snow II was coordinated with the launch of ParkCityGreen.org in order to establish a direct connection between raising awareness and concern about climate change and empowering residents to act on the problem.
1. Enhancing the Foundation’s Role in Community Conversations
Serving as the convener of Save Our Snow II helped PCF advance its cause of combating climate change and build its standing in the community. One important facet of the event’s success was the foundation’s ability to unite different segments of the community around one cause. PCF hosted numerous committee meetings which included media, business and nonprofit leaders in preparation for Save Our Snow II. In those meetings, PCF leaders intentionally crafted very specific messages and used language designed to integrate different segments of the community. In so doing, they successfully made the cause directly relevant for each stakeholder.
PCF staff also engaged local media and business leaders, including Park City Mountain Resort, which helped enhance the visibility of the event through its connections with the local media. The Park Record, the local paper and an important partner of the community foundation in raising awareness of ParkCityGreen.org, printed and distributed Save Our Snow inserts in the paper. Even before the event occurred or the website had launched, the preparation for Save Our Snow II attracted the foundation a lot of attention.
2. Amplifying the Foundation’s Visibility and Local Prominence
Convening the community for Save Our Snow II increased awareness of PCF’s existence and changed the community’s perception of its role in Park City. As is typical for newly-established community foundations, many local residents didn’t understand what PCF would do beyond attracting gifts and making grants. Various local nonprofit leaders were also anxious about the prospect of PCF becoming another competitor for the limited philanthropic resources in the community. Some residents were even uncertain whether PCF was distinct from the existing Park City Education Foundation, founded in the mid-1980s.
Save Our Snow II and ParkCityGreen.org demonstrated PCF’s relevance and established its position as a local leader with the relationships and skills required to successfully unite the community. These initiatives provided PCF with the platform to make clear that it was not created to compete for philanthropic dollars but rather to raise awareness of community-wide needs and ultimately attract more philanthropic support to address those needs. PCF showed that it would not simply grab a slice of the local philanthropic pie, but could increase the pie for the benefit of all local institutions.
3. Generating New Collaborations and Programs
Organizing Save Our Snow II with Park City Mountain Resort and collaborating with the city to develop ParkCityGreen.org has generated additional partnership opportunities for the foundation. These subsequent collaborations have contributed to greater progress on environmental preservation, and have allowed PCF to further define its leadership role by addressing more general community information needs.
Working with Mainstream Media
My Sustainable Year is designed to let people try out a new behavior for a week and also to drive traffic to the ParkCityGreen.org website, which is significant given KPCW’s 70 percent listener share.” – Park City Municipal staff” />In the wake of PCF’s initial efforts, Park City community leaders adopted new ways to maintain momentum around climate change. Diane Foster, Park City Environmental Sustainability Manager and manager of ParkCityGreen.org, and leaders from the local public radio station joined forces to create a weekly radio program, My Sustainable Year. The program, which includes PSAs that air three times per week on the radio, twice weekly Facebook updates, and monthly articles in The Park Record newspaper, provides residents with practical tips for reducing their carbon footprint that are appropriate to the season. The My Sustainable Year series has received positive feedback from residents, including the head of the local land conservancy, who had never ridden the bus in Park City before My Sustainable Year’s “Bus Adventure Week.” In addition to attracting attention itself, the My Sustainable Year series directs listeners and readers to ParkCityGreen.org, encouraging continued awareness raising and use of the website, and further building the reach and visibility of the foundation as a sponsor of the site.
PCF has also developed a stronger relationship the local newspaper, The Park Record. The publisher of the local paper was particularly impressed with the foundation’s convening ability. He had taken note of how PCF successfully brought together segments of the community that did not typically collaborate, including city administrators, families with school children, local ski resorts, the radio station and nonprofits. PCF leveraged that positive impression into another successful collaboration.
At a convening of Knight Foundation grantees, PCF staff member Katie Wright spoke with the Boulder Community Foundation about a Boulder community indicators report that highlights and categorizes a variety of statistics related to quality of life in Boulder. Inspired by this concept, Wright set out to develop a similar report for Park City and Summit County. Though the region has a thriving nonprofit community – Park City has over 80 nonprofit organizations in a town of 8,000 residents and region of 22,000 – no resource existed that summarized their work and parsed out the needs that they seek to address. Though tourist brochures and real estate publications abounded, there was no comprehensive, objective annual report of this type for Park City and Summit County.
Taking on More Community Information Needs
Wright returned to Park City fired up to launch a publication similar to Boulder’s. Because of the trust and respect that PCF had established with The Park Record through Save Our Snow II, the publisher received Wright’s proposal warmly. He also had a longstanding interest in publishing an almanac for the community. While the publisher was open to PCF’s proposal, he also saw the concept and partnership as a potential risk. In particular, he was unsure whether the project would generate a profit through advertising revenue and lacked confidence in PCF’s ability to sell advertisers on the idea. At the same time, he believed that the foundation had the right knowledge and relationships to conceptualize and assemble a publication that would fill an information gap in the community. Trusting that PCF would make it work, he decided to take the risk. The partnership culminated in the creation of Milepost 2010, a report published by The Park Record that includes statistics on statewide, city and county demographics as well as information on education, health, economy and tourism.
Milepost 2010 has been a significant project for PCF. It has allowed the foundation to assume a broader role in the community. The publication fills an important void in the community’s information ecosystem, and the community’s response has been so overwhelmingly positive that The Park Record plans to publish the report annually.
In future years the foundation plans to use Milepost 2010 as a starting point to provide a more in-depth understanding of Park City’s assets and challenges.
III. LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP
As a young and growing foundation, PCF has leveraged the Knight Community Information Challenge grant to quickly establish itself as a vital leader in its local community. By partnering with the city government to develop ParkCityGreen.org, and by organizing the Save Our Snow II with Park City Mountain Resort, PCF has developed a large network of influential partners and organized the broader community to take action on climate change. As the foundation bolstered its community presence and leadership, it has proved itself as a capable convener of diverse stakeholders. In four short years, it has gone from a new and little-known player to a visible and well-respected community institution, well-positioned to address a broad range of community needs.