History

Inception of the Fund

In November 1988, the Foothills Rotary Club of Fort Collins established the Foothills Rotary Charitable Foundation (the “Foundation” or “Fund”) to provide scholarships to local high school graduates and to support the charitable purposes of the Foothills Rotary Club of Fort Collins.

Under the guidance of Thomas Barbour, Johnna Bavoso, Pete Bullard, Chuck Decker, and Bert Pedri, who served as the Foundation’s initial board of directors, the Foundation emerged from the idea stage into a functioning 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

Early Stages

Thanks to the energy and initiative of the Foundation’s early leaders and the support of its many donors, the Foundation’s endowment grew to $100,000 by 1998. The Foundation also actively reviewed and selected scholarship recipients during its early years. Later, the Foundation would establish a partnership with Project Self-Sufficiency, through which Project Self-Sufficiency screens and recommends potential scholarship recipients for the Foundation’s review. That relationship has proven very successful and continues to this day.

Subsequent Growth

In December 1999, the Foundation’s board established the goals of growing the endowment to $300,000 by 2007 and to providing seven scholarships per year at $2,000 each. Through a series of creative fundraising activities that included raffles, silent and live auctions, casino nights, holiday parties and other themed events, the Foundation achieved one of its key goals when the Foundation’s total assets crossed the $300,000 threshold in 2006.

The New Challenges

The successful efforts and contributions of the Club members in the past created a fund that has achieved the vision of the Foundation’s early leadership in many respects.

Yet many challenges still remain, such as the ever increasing costs of secondary education in Northern Colorado and the expanding number of qualified scholarship candidates.

In light of these challenges, the Foundation’s board solicited input from the Club’s membership in 2006 regarding their vision for the Foundation in the future. The desires of the Club were clear:

• Increase the amount of each semester’s scholarship and the number of scholarships awarded
• Increase the Foundation’s endowment to $500,000
• Find other worthy projects to fund, to the extent possible

In response to that feedback, the Foundation established the following new goals:

• Reaching $500,000 in assets by 2012
• Periodically increasing the amount of the scholarships that it awards to help its scholarships keep pace with tuition increases, and
• Increasing the number of scholarships and other projects supported, as funds are available for those uses

In 2007, the Foundation increased its eight scholarships to $3,200 per year and adopted a new name, the “Foothills Scholarship and Education Fund” to clearly indicate its primary focus and to differentiate it from the Rotary International Foundation.