Organizational Memoir

Berks County Community Foundation: A History

In commemoration of 30 years of philanthropy 1994-2024

Inside Front Cover (blank)

Berks County Community Foundation

A History

In commemoration of 30 years of philanthropy

1994- 2024

by

Heidi Williamson, based on a series of interviews conducted with Kevin K. Murphy between January 2023 and June 2023

Edited by Molly McCullough Robbins, 2024

The First Threads

In the fabric of any given community, threads of the past and the future weave together to form a one-of-a-kind tapestry, honoring the traditional patterns that hold a place together while occasionally loosening just enough to allow new ribbons and strings, patterns and colors to find their way in, ultimately strengthening the whole.

Berks County in 1994 was by all accounts a community where tightly woven relationships, decades-old businesses, and cultural norms were loosening. There was fear – but also hope – about what was to come, coupled with a strong desire to preserve the civic structures and spirit upon which generations of community connections had flourished.

Berks County was not alone in this phenomenon. Across the United States, and in older industrial cities in particular – unlovingly referred to as the Rust Belt – good paying, family supporting manufacturing jobs were being shed at alarming rates, replaced by retail and service jobs that required different skills, different clothes, and, in some cases, different educational attainment levels.

It was into this world – where most phones remained attached to cords and the founding of Google lay four years in the future – that Berks County Community Foundation was born.

Gustav Oberlaender

The idea of a community foundation for Berks County came from a board member of the Wyomissing Foundation, which had been established in 1927 by Ferdinand Thun, Henry Janssen, and Gustav Oberlaender. These three men were German industrialists who founded and operated successful businesses. The Wyomissing Industries, as their business ventures were called, included Textile Machine Works, the Narrow Fabric Company, and the Berkshire Knitting Mills. The men were influential in nearly every major philanthropic project or activity that took place during that time – from the founding of museums to the establishment of hospitals.

And so it would be, more than six decades later, that Hildegard “Boots” Ryals, who also served as a board member of a community foundation in North Carolina, asked the Wyomissing Foundation’s board of directors why Berks County didn’t have one.

Alfred Hemmerich, a Wyomissing Foundation volunteer, was particularly excited by the idea. He took it upon himself to explore how community foundations worked and whether it would be possible to start one in Berks County.

“Alfred was a big man, and an energetic man,” said J. William Widing III, who served as the Community Foundation’s attorney when it was created, and later served as board chair. “He was motivated by a vision, he was committed to it, and he pursued it with as much energy as I’ve seen anybody pursue anything.”

Kevin K. Murphy, who would later become the Community Foundation’s first employee, understood immediately that the success of the fledgling effort rested on the big man’s shoulders. “Al had just retired from Gilbert Associates, a local engineering firm,” Murphy said, “and he needed a project. Having that much firepower available in that volume accelerated everything.”

Hemmerich knew he couldn’t set up a foundation on his own, so he called on Eugene Struckhoff, a former president of the Washington DC-based Council on Foundations and created a local steering committee made up of Widing and other civic leaders interested in forming a community foundation in Berks County.

A prominent local attorney, Sidney D. Kline, future founding board member, once said Hemmerich’s enthusiasm alone was enough to convince many people to join him. “If Alfred asked you to get involved with something, you did it.”

Berks County Community Foundation’s articles of incorporation were filed on June 7, 1994. Ten incorporators — all members of the steering committee — signed the document: Thomas A.

BOARD CHAIRS

1994-1997

Alfred G. Hemmerich, Founding Board Chair 1997-1999

Donald Van Roden

1999-2001

Sidney D. Kline, Jr. 2001-2003

Robert W. Cardy

2003-2005

Samuel A. McCullough

2005-2008

Julia H. Klein

2008-2011

Joni S. Naugle

2011-2014

Kathleen D. Herbein

2014-2017

J. William Widing, III, Esq.

2017-2020

P. Sue Perrotty

2020-2023

Alfred J. Weber

2023-

Susan N. Denaro, Esq.

Al Hemmerich and Kevin Murphy

Beaver, Nancy V. Giles, Alfred G. Hemmerich, Sidney D. Kline, Karen A. Rightmire, June A. Roedel, William K. Runyeon, David L. Thun, Donald van Roden, and J. William Widing III.

“At the time, the vision was to establish a place where people could start donor-advised funds, rather than their own personal family foundations,” said original board member Karen Rightmire, who was the executive director of the United Way of Berks County at the time. “It was a really easy, good way for people who wanted to make gifts in perpetuity, or to make charitable gifts, to do it through the foundation.”

Many of the Community Foundation’s first board members were also on the board of the Wyomissing Foundation, including Tom Beaver, who said the Wyomissing Foundation’s willingness to give the young organization $1 million in initial operating funds was a pivotal moment.

The Wyomissing Foundation wasn’t the only group helping the Community Foundation get on its feet. The United Way of Berks County incubated the Community Foundation.

“The Community Foundation’s staff worked in our offices for more than two years until they were ready to afford a space,” Rightmire said. She was interested in being involved in the Community Foundation because it had some of the same goals as the United Way, and she thought the two groups could do more if they worked together.

In fact, the initial work of the steering committee had employed a model of community engagement straight from the United Way’s playbook, a model designed to include a large number of volunteers. Committees were established to study the environment, arts and culture, and other areas before Murphy was even hired.

“There was a feeling that we should get people who have expertise in those areas to help us identify how grants would be distributed to support them,” Murphy said. “Except for human services. The steering committee didn’t form a human services committee because it was assumed all that money should go to the United Way for distribution. “The committees were incredibly helpful, though. Through the involvement of so many volunteers, we built a much larger constituency than we could have built with just a board, and their insight and guidance provided a springboard to do some community leadership work. In turn, that community leadership work made it clear that the Community Foundation wasn’t afraid to take risks to shake things up if the data said they needed to be shaken up. That set the tone for everything that would come after.”

But first, the new organization needed someone to run it, someone who wasn’t a volunteer, but was paid to think about the community and philanthropy day in and day out. In June 1994, the board hired Murphy as its first executive director. The title was significant. Born under the shadow of the United Way, the new leader became an “executive director” just as Rightmire was at the United Way. It wasn’t until Rightmire received the title “president” that the Community Foundation could follow suit.

“We needed to look like a permanent institution,” Murphy said, “and permanent institutions don’t put rotating volunteer faces out in the community. They raise the visibility of their leader, and one way to do that was to elevate the title.”

So, with its first executive director ensconced at the United Way’s offices, the Community Foundation set out to raise money and differentiate itself as a new, exciting kind of institution dedicated to community philanthropy. And to do that, it needed to attract money for an endowment fund.

“Creating an endowment fund was an important first step to ensuring the ultimate financial stability of the organization,” Murphy said. “In addition to attracting people to establish their own charitable funds, we knew we needed the flexibility provided by an unrestricted endowment if we were to take on the most pressing issues in the community.”

The board got to work, deploying a team of people to approach corporations, banks, and other resources in the area. They explained what the Community Foundation was and what its goals were and solicited seed money to build up the foundation’s corpus.

“The board members were well-respected in Berks County,” Murphy said. “Although the Community Foundation was a brand-new organization with no track record, their reputations, along with the blessing of the Wyomissing Foundation, gave us the keys to the clubhouse. People gave money because they respected the civic leaders who were involved in the effort. The board members were in their prime and wanted to leave a mark. They ran Fortune 500 companies. They were leaders, people with juice.”

These leaders were products of the community culture of the era. They came from a cohort of dominant employers and were interconnected. They didn’t have business relationships – they didn’t necessarily sell anything to each other – but they went to the same churches and country club, and they believed that being involved in the community was important.

“They let me into the club because our board members were members of the club,” Murphy said. “That cleared a lot of paths and cracked the doors open.”

Murphy also understood that many of these leaders had gatekeepers who were incredibly important. These administrative assistants kept their many engagements, events, and appointments on track.

“I had an assistant, too, and she was well connected. Her name was Sharon Schwoyer. Very early on, she invited all the gatekeepers to lunch and told them about the Community Foundation. It was the first time many of them had met in person. They’d only talked on the phone before. After that luncheon, it was easier to have my calls go through.”

Having those calls go through was critical for the young organization because the leaders helped make connections that led to donations. People had said it would be unrealistic to think the Community Foundation could raise $5 million in the first five years, but by the third year it had already reached $7 million.

“They weren’t large sums...but they were meaningful,” said former board member Donald van Roden. “It was amazing how many of these organizations were willing to participate.”

The board was successful at raising funds, and it was large – another United Way model – topping 30 members.

“It was the most influential board you could have put together,” Murphy said. “And that’s what rattled people when we began to take on community leadership work. I was like a little bear cub with this giant bear behind me. People paid attention.”

Alfred Hemmerich passed away in 1999, but his legacy lives on through the Community Foundation he worked so hard to create. “I think he would be very proud of what has been accomplished, and justifiably so,” Kline once said.

Weaving Something New

The First Five Years: 1994 – 1999

By the mid-1990s, Berks County was changing, yet some traditions held firm as the Community Foundation embarked on a journey to grow into a philanthropic institution that would not only manage charitable funds, but also have an impact on the quality of life for the community it served. To get started, Murphy and the board looked for ways to tap into those traditions and quickly raise the organization’s visibility with local leaders and the public.

The Peirce Report

MISSION

To promote philanthropy and improve the quality of life for the residents of Berks County.

One tradition that still held tight was the power of the local press, particularly the Reading Eagle, a family-owned newspaper that had served the community for generations, first as a German-language paper called the Reading Adler, before switching to English in 1868.

Charles “Chuck” Gallagher was the editor of the paper, a kind man with a deep commitment to journalism who knew Berks County and its players better than anyone. He ran a large, busy, traditional newsroom on Penn Street, and served as the head of its editorial board. And in those days, if people planned to do anything important – like start a community foundation – they went to talk to the editorial board.

Less usual was what happened next. After learning about the Community Foundation and running a story about its creation, Gallagher asked for a meeting with Murphy, who quickly accepted the invitation. There was a trend called Solutions Journalism percolating in newsrooms across the country, Gallagher told Murphy, an example of which was a research project to study the state of cities. It was called The Peirce Report.

Gallagher was interested in bringing The Peirce Report to Reading, but he had a problem: He didn’t think he could sell enough advertising to fund its publication. He wondered if a project like this might be something the fledgling Community Foundation could provide a grant to support.

His timing couldn’t have been better. David L. Thun, a board member who

was the nephew of the Thuns who had started the Wyomissing Foundation, was leading the Community Foundation’s environmental committee. Through their research, Thun and the committee had determined it would be in Berks County’s best interest to act more as a region to address land use issues. The committee was particularly concerned about a massive uptick in housing development that was gobbling up farmland in the rural areas of the county, while the City of Reading was in deep decline and viewed as an anchor around the region.

“For us it felt like an opportunity to establish something important to Al Hemmerich,” Murphy said. “The Peirce Report was a marquee project that would position us as forward-looking and providing leadership rather than reacting to stuff people already saw as a problem but had no research to support.”

The Peirce Report did its job. Published as an insert in the Reading Eagle on May 2, 1996, the report outlined key issues facing Berks County and, in turn, raised the visibility of the Community Foundation. The report put words to what people intuitively knew – that the model of 76 municipalities and unhinged land use wasn’t working – not for Berks County, and not for Pennsylvania.

At a time when business and civic leaders still began each day by reading the printed newspaper, The Peirce Report caused a lot of conversation in the community. The Community Foundation did what it could to keep that conversation going, including bringing the author of the report, Tom Hilton, to town for a presentation.

“The data the report provided – and the conversations it sparked – laid the groundwork for things like a farmland preservation program and likely played a role in the explosion of intergovernmental cooperation agreements and joint planning that came afterward,” Murphy said. “None of that was happening before The Peirce Report.” Indeed, after years of strained relationships, even Reading’s Mayor and Berks County’s Director began to talk in earnest about cooperation.

Not everyone was happy with the report, however. Some residents complained that none of its recommendations were implemented, while others were concerned that perhaps the new organization known as the Community Foundation had gone a step too far by taking the lead to fund it.

“I was summoned to the Chamber of Commerce,” Murphy said. Like the daily newspaper, the Chamber was a major, influential force in the community at the time. “The Chamber’s board chair and its president asked me why they hadn’t been consulted about the report. I explained that I had, in fact, talked to the president about it in advance. I was told that was not enough. In the future,

I should consult with the Chamber board before moving forward with a major community report like this one.”

The fledgling Community Foundation’s leadership role, it seemed, had pricked some nerves.

At the same time, however, the establishment of the Community Foundation had elevated the importance of philanthropy in Berks County. Soon both Murphy and Rightmire were invited to be part of the Berks Business Executives Forum, a group of local business leaders that was separate from the Chamber and whose host, Sam McCullough of Meridian Bank, called members together monthly for lunch. Most of the men – and until Rightmire joined they were all men – sat on nonprofit boards throughout the community and were often asked to raise money for projects or to chair capital campaigns. As a result, charitable projects were often pitched at those lunches, and if they were well received, corporate financial commitments flowed to them.

McCullough would be influential for the Community Foundation in other ways, too.

The Thun Award

“We kept asking ourselves, how do we establish this young organization and make it look like it was built by the Romans?” Murphy said. “The answer was to continue to be surrounded by the rock-solid pillars of the community. Sam McCullough was one of those pillars, and no one was a bigger supporter of the Community Foundation than Sam.”

A few years before the Community Foundation was founded, Meridian Bank – long a beloved community employer – had created The Thun Award. It was Sam’s idea, along with Meridian’s President Zeke Ketchum, to create an award to honor Ferdinand and Louis Thun. Sam approached Murphy and asked if the Community Foundation could co-sponsor the award. In return, the Community Foundation used its unrestricted assets to set up an endowed charitable fund from which each Thun Award recipient could recommend a grant. Sam knew the connection to the Thun Award would be good for the Community Foundation and would allow the annual honor to continue, even as bank mergers accelerated across the country, and in Berks County.

“It felt like the right thing for the Community Foundation to honor local philanthropists of that era,” Murphy said. “The Thun Award is a legacy to their time, which in many ways was ending as the Community Foundation was

THUN AWARD RECIPIENTS

1988: Ferdinand K. Thun and Louis R. Thun

1989: Gertrude Sternbergh

1990: H.O. “Mike” Beaver

1991: Eugene L. Shirk

1992: Severin Fayerman

1993: Albert Boscov

1994: Paul and June Roedel

1995: Sidney and Barbara Kline

1996: Samuel A. McCullough

1997: Dr. Charles A. Carabello

1998: John F. Horrigan Jr.

1999: T. Jerome and Carolyn Holleran

2000: P. Michael Ehlerman

2001: Robert W. Cardy

2003: Thomas P. Handwerk

2004: Karen A. Rightmire

2005: David L. Thun

2007: DeLight E. Breidegam

2008: Gordon G. Hoodak

2013: C. Thomas Work

2014: Irvin and Lois E. Cohen

2015: The Honorable Arthur E. Grim and Louise C. Grim

2016: Christ “Chris” G. Kraras

2017: Carole and Ray Neag

2018: Carl D. and Kathleen D. Herbein

2020/2022: Eric Jenkins and Julia Klein

beginning. The community depended on this core group of civic leaders to spearhead and pay for important projects for years, long before the Community Foundation was formed. We really delivered something to them by making sure the Thun Award would go on forever. The Thun Award symbolized and honored the work they’d done during their lifetimes and they were proud to receive it. Today, recipients of the Thun Award are very honored to follow in their footsteps.”

Honoring a Legacy in Boyertown

While much of the work in the early days centered on the City of Reading and its immediate suburbs, the Community Foundation began outreach to other areas of the county as well. Wayne Weidner, who served on the Community Foundation’s board, was an executive at National Penn Bank, formerly the National Bank of Boyertown. A few years after the Community Foundation began, National Penn Bank found itself in a difficult position – it was responsible for the Boyertown Community Trust, a community foundation in its own right, with about $2.5 million in assets. The problem was, as a public charity, the Boyertown Community Trust was obligated to raise money from and support the community or risk the IRS deeming it a private foundation. With no staff to fundraise, the trust soon fell into that status. With Weidner’s help, and with the blessing of bank chair Larry Jilk, the trust folded into the Community Foundation, giving it an important foothold in the southeastern part of Berks County and a very important financial boost. The Community Foundation began outreach in

Boyertown, and soon scholarship and community funds began to flow in for the area’s benefit.

A One-of-a-Kind Institution

With The Peirce Report, the Thun Award, and the transfer of the trust from National Penn Bank, the Community Foundation’s name and reputation grew stronger. Soon others were seeking out ways to give through this new vehicle for community philanthropy.

“We began to receive bequests from people like Erich Hemmerich, who was Al’s cousin,” Murphy said. “Eric wanted to create a fund to support South Mountain YMCA, but worried about that nonprofit’s ability to manage a substantial donation. Instead, he created a fund with us through his will to provide an annual grant to South Mountain YMCA in perpetuity.”

Business executives continued to turn to the Community Foundation to help solve their charitable challenges. For example, when VF Corporation – the successor to the original Wyomissing Industries – relocated its headquarters, it turned to the Community Foundation to provide a soft landing for the Berks County nonprofits the company had been supporting for years.

”Mackey McDonald and Larry Pugh were instrumental in conceiving of a $10 million fund that would sunset after ten years,” Murphy said. Over that period, Berks County nonprofits would continue to receive donations, weaned over time, from the company’s fund even after it relocated from the area. It was a creative approach, and soon it became clear that no other organization in Berks County could provide the kind of charitable expertise and innovation that the fund required.

“All of this happened in very short sequence,” Murphy said. “We went from faking it – raising money for The Peirce Report to make it look like we had money – to having a significant enough corpus to show people this wasn’t a passing fad.”

Murphy’s strategy was simple: Help anyone who wanted to do something charitable in the community while seeking out opportunities to grow by attracting existing endowments that would benefit from the Community Foundation’s expertise.

“We solved a problem for Berks County. Before we came along, if you wanted to give to a cause other than human services through the United Way, you needed to set up a charitable trust at a bank,” Murphy explained. “But the banks were raising their minimum trust sizes at the same time they were merging

THE COMMUNITY GENERAL HOSPITAL FOUNDATION

JUNE A. ROEDEL HEALTHCARE SCHOLARSHIP FUND

In the Community Foundation’s earliest days, scholarships played an important role in getting the word out about the organization. Even those who knew nothing about community philanthropy understood the concept behind a scholarship fund.

In 1997, as Community General Hospital was determining its future, a scholarship fund its foundation managed was transferred to the Community Foundation to ensure it would continue to support local students no matter the hospital’s fate.

Since the scholarship was established in 1997, it has awarded 577 scholarships totaling more than $1 million.

and losing local control. Before the Community Foundation came along, if you couldn’t meet the bank minimums, there was no other way to create a trust.”

The changes in the banking landscape had another impact as well. “Even the banks were offloading their smaller trusts to us once they saw we could manage them,” Murphy continued. “All of it added up. The banks transferred their smaller trusts to us. The Boyertown Community Trust had fallen into private foundation status. VF needed a vehicle to deploy its grants after it left town. Gustav Oberlaender, who’d been one of the original German industrialists, had started his own private foundation but his heirs realized it was more cost effective and efficient to let the Community Foundation’s professional staff manage it. And in that way, by solving the community’s charitable quandaries, we grew quickly.”

A Learning Organization

At the same time the Community Foundation began attracting endowments, it was also learning what it meant to be a community foundation. That included being out in the neighborhoods and helping wherever it could, building relationships and trust.

“When Patrick O’Pake passed away, for instance, his brother, State Senator Mike O’Pake, created a fund in his honor to help children at Glenside Elementary School in Reading. Before the Community Foundation, there wouldn’t have been a way to do that,” Murphy said.

Part of learning what it meant to be a community foundation involved connecting

to state and national networks. One of the first opportunities to do that came through a fellow community foundation president, Mike Batchelor from the Erie Community Foundation. Mike was working on a statewide effort to distribute the trust of Benjamin Franklin, which had matured after two hundred years. Mike had Berks County Community Foundation added to the list of foundations that would receive a distribution from Franklin’s estate.

“The Franklin Trust led to high quality publicity,” Murphy said. “It helped us tell the story of perpetuity and the power of endowments to continue to provide support for important causes and secure a legacy over time.”

Receiving a distribution from the trust of Benjamin Franklin and using it to create a permanent endowment for the benefit of Berks County was also important because it served as a testament to the permanence of what was still a very young organization.

“It’s an interesting challenge,” Murphy said, “to create an organization that from the very start looks like it has been and will be around forever. We took steps to exemplify the idea of permanence, including creating a logo and marketing materials that had the look and feel of a company that had existed for a long time.”

Fortunately, others had been through similar challenges across Pennsylvania and the country and had formed trade associations to help those who were just getting started and to provide networking opportunities. Three weeks before he took on the role of executive director, for instance, Murphy was invited to attend a Community Foundations for Pennsylvania conference, where he was welcomed with open arms.

BEN FRANKLIN TRUST

The estate of Benjamin Franklin provided Berks County Community Foundation’s first bequest. An inventor, writer, statesman, and printer, Franklin was also one of the first to create an endowment for the benefit of his community. In his will, Franklin gave 1,000 Pounds Sterling each to the cities of Philadelphia and Boston.

Franklin left specific instructions about how the money should be invested and then used for the benefit of the community after 200 years had passed. In the early 1990s, a portion of that money came to Berks County Community Foundation as its first bequest. We were never able to thank Dr. Franklin for his gift, which we used to create The Ben Franklin Trust Fund. Grants from the fund support educational initiatives in Franklin’s name.

“Alfred ‘Burr’ Wishart, president of the Pittsburgh Foundation and Carole Perry, president of the Philadelphia Foundation, sat with me at lunch and put on a master class about what a community foundation actually was, which had nothing to do with what I’d been told when I accepted the job,” Murphy said. “It was incredibly valuable, to learn from those who were already doing the work. They offered an amazing support system that ultimately accelerated the impact we could have in Berks County. All I had to do was call, and an answer was there.”

Murphy also joined the national Council on Foundations and attended its fall conference in Minneapolis in 1994 with about 400 other foundation leaders. There, he saw the work of Berks County Community Foundation as part of a larger movement to bring philanthropy to everyday people and help them support the causes they cared about.

Building a Staff

“We were moving quickly, learning, and making a difference in the community,” Murphy said. “But when Al Hemmerich passed away unexpectedly, I thought it may have ended the thing. He’d been in the office nearly full time and that was an enormous benefit. He was like a staff member. He made phone calls, and he knew everyone. He was part of the club; he was part of the Thun family.”

After Hemmerich’s death, Murphy hired Schwoyer, his assistant, who would go on to help him connect to all those gatekeepers. “This was before the internet and there was a lot more paper, a lot more clerical work, and it took dozens of phone calls to organize committee meetings. And we were heavy on committees.”

It soon became clear that even more help was needed, and the United Way offered to split the cost and time of a third employee, Monica Ruano-Wenrich. Before long the United Way needed Monica full time, so the Community Foundation hired its first program officer, Pat Giles, who would go on to work at United Way and the Wyomissing Foundation in later years. Franki Aitken joined the Community Foundation in 1997 as a contracted fiscal officer. By 1998, she was formerly hired as the Chief Financial Officer and Director of Donor Services. Hiring Franki represented a big step. “We were not only beginning to prepare for the complex accounting and financial management effort ahead of us, we were making a major move to implement a strategy of asset development focused on professional advisors, Murphy said. It was a gamble that paid off.

Next came Kay Haring, who joined the Community Foundation in 1999 to handle donor relations. One of Kay’s first assignments was to handle a fundraiser

STAFF LIST 1994-2024

Frances Aitken

Paraskevi “Vivi” Anthony

Jason Brudereck

Erica Caceres

Marni Churchill

June Clougher

Sally Cox

Kathy Culp

Leta Doganes

Eunis Domenech

Patricia Giles

Daniel Gombar

Zoraida Gonzalez

Lisa Gresh

Melissa Hahn

Kay Haring

Patricia Hartline

Julie Hartman

Ella Hayes

Lori Irwin

Sarah Loose

Kevin Lugo

Richard Mappin

Cindy Milian

Thomas Moore

Ivonne Muniz

Josie Munroe

Kevin Murphy

Tammy Phillips

Monica Reyes

Molly McCullough Robbins

Megan Roswick

Monica Ruano Wenrich

Sharon Schwoyer

Kim Sheffer

Emily Smedley

Heidi Williamson

for the Jim Brett Fund. Brett was an internationally known environmentalist who was retiring from Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. His friend, David Thun, wanted to recognize and honor Brett and make sure the international student program he’d established would continue. Brett was a good friend of Jane Goodall, whom he invited to Berks County to speak, with the proceeds from the ticket sales raising money for the fund.

Jane Goodall was the first in a long line of keynote speakers that the Community Foundation would bring to the community over the next three decades. The goal was always to go out into the world and bring back big and important ideas that challenged the status quo and encouraged people to improve the county.

By the dawn of the new millennium, Berks County Community Foundation was a young, thriving organization with nine staff members fully focused on its mission to promote philanthropy and improve the quality of life for the residents of Berks County.

The Tapestry Takes Shape 2000 – 2005

As Berks County Community Foundation entered the new millennium, Murphy and the team spent their days managing an influx of new charitable funds while also looking for ways to bring new ideas to Berks County. That work led the Community Foundation’s senior staff members to seek out connections with state, national, and international leaders in philanthropy to learn all they could about ways foundations big and small were making a difference.

One of those connections led to a deeper understanding of the role of philanthropy in a democracy and to opportunities for cultural exchanges. In 2000, The German Marshall Fund offered fellowships for Americans working in philanthropy to spend three weeks in a European city that was attempting to establish a community foundation. The goal was to promote philanthropy to strengthen civil society.

Two colleagues Kevin had met at Council on Foundations conferencesDiana Seiger from the Grand Rapids Community Foundation in Michigan, and Shannon St. John from the Triangle Community Foundation in Research Triangle, North Carolina – encouraged him to apply for the German Marshall Fund Fellowship.

“I thought it would be interesting, so I submitted an application,” Murphy said, “and lo and behold, I was selected. It was an honor, although I had to wait to find out where I would be sent.”

And when he did find out, it was a shock.

“The German Marshall Fund was sending me to Togliatti, Russia,” Murphy said. “I had never heard of Togliatti, and my knowledge of Russia was limited to what I’d read in the papers and been exposed to during the Cold War while I was growing up. I immediately attempted to research the location, but the internet was nascent and the only thing I could find was a website for a Russian bride operation that sold tours to Togliatti for guys who wanted to take a wife.”

Murphy soon learned he was the first – and would be the only – fellow the German Marshall Fund ever sent to Russia. “They sent me there because the potential of building a civil society in Russia was incredibly important. The country remained heavily disorganized after the fall of the Soviet Union a decade before, and it hadn’t really figured out democracy.”

But the German Marshall Fund knew of a bright spot in the fledging world of Russian philanthropy: The Togliatti Community Foundation. “It stood out,” Murphy said. “It was the first one created and it served as the mothership for all the other Russian community foundations. They invited me to be the keynote speaker at their community foundation conference, which was being held in the town.” Murphy’s experience in Togliatti made him rethink the role a local community foundation could play. He became more and more convinced that part of the job of his senior team was to be well traveled, witness what was happening in other communities, and learn from their challenges, rather than making Berks County an island on its own. He realized that Berks County needed an organization that could point out big trends and connect to communities with similar problems.

Part of making that happen included adding a communication professional to the senior team. In August 2001, Murphy hired Heidi Williamson, who had been the global communication manager at Exide Corporation reporting to its chief executive, car mogul Bob Lutz. By tapping into high-achieving professionals

TRIP TO RUSSIA

My first visit to Russia was an eye opener. In 2001, the country had barely begun to recover from the devastating economic and cultural effects of Soviet rule. The whole place had a “wild west” feel to it. In the car on the way to Togliatti, my driver was pulled over and shaken down for a bribe by the two police officers. The driver thought nothing of it.

On my third night in Togliatti, I was invited to a birthday party and seated next to a very nice Russian woman who went out of her way to befriend me. At some point, she surreptitiously began filling my shot glass with water as there was no way I could keep pace with the number of toasts being offered and make it to my flight to Moscow the next day. She couldn’t have been nicer. So, imagine my surprise when, the next day in Moscow, I saw her seated two tables away at an outdoor café in a park. We chatted and, at that moment, I realized that the FSB (the successor to the KGB) was watching me. It made sense as American foundations are viewed with deep suspicion by the Russian government, and they have a massive internal security force.

Over the course of our visits to Russia, we saw a country maturing rapidly. Great wealth began to accumulate in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Previously horrible public infrastructure, like Soviet era airports, was replaced with gleaming modern facilities. Squat toilets disappeared in many spots and were replaced with more comfortable accommodations, and travel became easier. Unfortunately, we couldn’t continue the exchanges that followed my initial trip after tensions between Putin’s Russia and the United States grew.

from the corporate world, as he had done a few years earlier with Aitken, Murphy positioned the Community Foundation to take on big projects, finance them, and communicate about them effectively.

The Community Foundation’s focus on the local impact of national and global issues came into stark relief on the crystal-clear morning of September 11, 2001. As the day began at the foundation’s rented offices on the eighth floor of the former Berkshire Hotel at Fifth and Washington streets in Reading, reports trickled in about an airplane hitting the World Trade Center in New York City. It was shocking – but not unheard of – for a small plane to veer offcourse to catastrophic consequences for those on board, and that was what the Community Foundation team assumed had happened in New York.

It wasn’t until a second plane struck the second tower that the enormity of what was happening began to register, and as news came through that the planes were commercial airliners and that flights were being grounded nationwide, the team watched in horror.

And then, they got to work.

The reaction to the attack from the foundation world was rapid. Almost immediately, word went out that the New York Community Trust had created a charitable fund to accept donations to address the aftermath of the attacks in New York City. Murphy knew, however, that the impact of the attack would reach far beyond that city. In response, within twenty-four hours Berks County Community Foundation started its own September 11th Fund. Its purpose was to ensure that unexpected expenses incurred by Berks County organizations or families could be reimbursed.

“Berks County is nearly equidistant from the three places where the planes were brought down,” Murphy said. “Within hours, local organizations were called upon to help – the Salvation Army was asked to provide warehouse space, Angel Flight was asked to fly cadaver dogs to Ground Zero, and South Mountain YMCA was asked to provide camperships for children who had witnessed the attacks. It was the first time we rapidly reacted to anything, and, from that experience, we knew it was time to put a business continuity and disaster plan in place.”

That planning would come later and would include the creation of an operational resiliency plan for the organization, and a disaster plan for the community.

The Community Foundation’s role in driving the local reaction to the September 11th attacks was indicative of another change that was happening in Berks County during this time period.

YOUTH ADVISORY COMMITTEES AND CULTURAL EXCHANGES

When Murphy accepted the German Marshall Fund Fellowship, he had no idea the experience would lead to another very important connection, too, one that would provide a huge opportunity for young people in Berks County.

For years, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan, had been a huge advocate for the creation of Youth Advisory Committees at community foundations. These committees brought groups of teens together to learn about and practice philanthropy – from fundraising to grantmaking – in their own communities. Berks County Community Foundation’s program officer at the time, Pat Giles, was interested in the concept and launched our first Youth Advisory Committee in 1998.

The Russian community foundation leaders were intrigued by Youth Advisory Committees and asked Murphy how ours worked. Soon the Togliatti Community Foundation had created one of its own and wanted to promote the idea to other Russian community foundations. By 2004, the program had proven so successful that Murphy and his counterpart at the Togliatti Community Foundation, Boris Tsurlinikov, began to talk about a youth exchange program.

“The Mott Foundation gave us funding to cover some of the costs of an exchange,” Murphy said. “It was an opportunity for our kids to experience philanthropy in a very different culture and bring back ideas that could broaden everyone’s perspective. This was not a class trip to Disney – there were lots of moving parts to get it to work. But ultimately, we took seven YAC members, three staff members, and the Mayor of Reading, Tom McMahon, to St. Petersburg, Togliatti, Penza, and Moscow. They were the keynote speakers at that year’s Russian Community Foundation conference. And it was the first of three trips to Russia our YAC members would make over the next decade.”

The Mott Foundation also provided support for Russian community foundation staff members and several of their YAC members to visit community foundations in the United States and Canada, including in Berks County.

The exchanges ended with Russia’s crackdown on nongovernmental agencies. The country severely limited the work of non-profit groups (which they call non-governmental agencies) from outside Russia, and marked several, including the Mott Foundation, as the spreaders of particularly troublesome ideas.

“The leadership structure in Berks County was shifting,” Murphy said. “The banks had been sold and companies were leaving or consolidating, which meant that the corporate leaders who for so long had managed the civic life of the community no longer had the time to dedicate to such work. Companies moved away and their leaders moved with them. Organizations merged and the headquarters – and leaders – were located somewhere else. Corporations downsized, leaving fewer hours for volunteer and civic works. More and more, the Community Foundation was asked to – or took the initiative to – step into that void. We couldn’t sit back and support whatever someone else was doing –we had to be at the table dictating what needed to get done.”

The more leadership roles the Community Foundation took on, the more attention it received. And that attention led to growth and maturity, which led to the professional development of an already highly professional senior team.

At the same time, the Community Foundation field was changing. For years, foundations worked within a trust model, seeking endowments, investing them for the long term, and distributing grants from the earnings. As the field grew, creativity grew, too. Soon community foundations were seeking out individuals who would give to pass-through donor-advised funds.

Donor advised funds had been around for a while. Traditionally, community foundations sought out living donors who would create endowments and recommend grants from those endowments until their death, at which time one additional generation could continue to recommend grants if the donor designated someone to fulfill that role. At the end of the advisement period, the fund would distribute grants based on the instructions the donor left in the fund agreement.

“What changed,” Murphy said, “was the nature of donor advised funds. Large financial service providers like Fidelity and Merrill Lynch began offering non-endowed options for their clients. That meant that people could give to a charitable fund and grant out all of the money at once. Many community foundations felt the need to offer similar vehicles, and in some cases, really doubled down on them.”

Berks County Community Foundation did not follow that trend. Instead, the Community Foundation would administer these “pass-through” products when someone requested them but continued to seek out endowed funds.

“I was in grad school at the time and wrote a paper about why we didn’t want to pursue the pass-through model,” Murphy said. “It was a key decision that influenced the trajectory of our organization. While many community

foundations became grant transaction centers – money in and money out based on donor recommendations – we stayed true to the endowment model and sought out field-of-interest and undesignated funds that would allow us to capitalize on opportunities for the community now and over time.”

It was not a popular position at the time, but it was the right one for the community. “It allowed us to focus on community leadership work, including a long-term focus on the revitalization of downtown Reading,” Murphy said.

That work led to foundation-sponsored site visits for community leaders to places like Greenville, South Carolina, which had a similar downtown and had managed to revitalize it. “We had a long history of bringing people together to work on economic development, including making grants to start the Downtown Improvement District in Reading and the Main Street Program in West Reading. Economic development was fragmented and not particularly effective, and we felt like we could help make a difference.”

As part of that work, in 2005 the Community Foundation partnered with Harvard University Professor Michael Porter, who was managing a group called the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICGR), which was doing work in other older industrial cities. With the help of Porter’s group, the Community Foundation led The Initiative for a Competitive Greater Reading, which brought more than 100 community leaders together to create a plan for future economic development. The plan ultimately sought to position Berks County as part of a larger region, to strengthen the urban core, and to combine several economic development agencies under one umbrella.

“Convening is one of the most effective tools in a community foundation’s toolbox,” Murphy said, “and in the case of ICGR, our convening work increased our visibility and cemented our position as a community leadership organization. People saw us as effective and even-handed, and understood that they could come to us with an idea or a problem and be given a fair shake.”

One of the biggest bets on downtown revitalization had come several years earlier in the construction of a hockey arena on Penn Street, which had been decades in the making. That project led to the demolition of the Astor Theater on Penn Street. To soothe the wound of that loss, the Civic Center Authority agreed to launch a capital campaign to renovate the historic Rajah Theater on Sixth Street, a campaign that would be managed by Kay Haring.

“Of course, the Civic Center Authority didn’t have the capacity to run a large fundraising effort and no other nonprofit was willing to take it on. We’d just hired

PROFESSIONAL ADVISOR STRATEGY

Over the years, Franki Aitken, who would become the Community Foundation’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, developed relationships with lawyers, accountants, estate planners, and trust officers to ensure they knew about the Community Foundation and the services it offered. Through that work, hundreds of bequests were written to benefit the community and support a variety of causes.

In addition to working with this word-of-mouth sales force, Aitken earned a seat on the board of the Law Foundation of Berks County and had Community Foundation staff take on the administration of the Berks County Estate Planning Council. She was also heavily involved in the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants, serving as its president later in her career.

All of this work helped both professional advisors and community members better understand the value and importance of philanthropy and how the Community Foundation could help people achieve their charitable goals.

Kay as our first development officer, so we offered to lend her to the Civic Center Authority to run the capital campaign. Our role in that important initiative was another reflection of our growing influence in Berks County.”

The City of Reading was not the only area of the county that was experiencing significant change during this period. In rural areas, development pressure was straining agriculture and open space as the county’s 76 municipalities each created their own land-use policies.

“We helped to start the Center for Local Government at Albright College,” Murphy said, “and it brought together the municipalities to begin conversations about cooperation and collaboration. We also made a $4,000 grant to convene all of the people who were interested in land use issues and, with the help of an expert facilitator, emerged with a joint recommendation to preserve 200,000 acres of farmland to ensure the future of the business of agriculture for the community. Preserving the farmland and open space would in turn help to preserve the character of the community, and that was important to the residents here.”

All of that leadership work and growth led the Community Foundation to continually adjust its operational capacity.

“During this period, we started to look at how to sustain operations without having to do an annual operating campaign,” Murphy said. “We didn’t want to be in a position where we were constantly tapping the corporate community for donations, particularly with the changing nature of business in Berks County. We knew - thanks to the research we’d done into other foundations

and through Franki’s financial prowess - that if we got the asset size to a certain level, the organization could be sustained from the management fees. We wanted to get to a point where we were independent of external forces as quickly as possible. As long as we were being funded by outside influences, we could be told what to do. Once we could sustain ourselves on management fees, we would no longer have to defer to anyone.”

Fortunately, the Community Foundation’s growth accelerated. Soon it was called upon to manage charitable funds with unique characteristics and restrictions, all of which provided significant operating revenue or influence.

One of those funds, the Metropolitan Edison Sustainable Energy Fund, came through a relationship Murphy had forged at a state event. The executive director of the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies in Johnstown, David Kraybill, was interested in having the foundation he managed be the repository for the proceeds from a settlement related to the statewide deregulation of electricity companies. In order to proceed, however, he needed to partner with an organization in the territory served by Met-Ed.

“Dave asked if we’d be interested and we were in a position and on a trajectory to say yes, even though it seemed like an odd thing,” Murphy said. “Creating that fund threw us into a different realm where we demonstrated that we could deal with sophisticated technical issues, that we could dive in and do complicated stuff that’s big.”

Leaders in Berks County took notice, too, and when the Community General Hospital was sold, the board of its foundation felt comfortable and confident in transferring its assets to the Community Foundation to be held in perpetuity to support healthcare initiatives in the community. Over the years, grants from that fund paid for Berks County’s first public health needs assessment, for the legwork necessary to establish the county’s first Federally Qualified Health Center, and for the resources necessary to advocate for a much-needed Department of Health.

“The Community General Hospital Healthcare Fund was a testament to the power of the relationships our staff built during this time,” Murphy said. “When I met with Steve Weidman and pitched the idea that moving the hospital’s charitable assets to a fund at the Community Foundation could create generational change, he listened. The fund allowed us to establish expertise in a different area. Gene Struckoff had put all the value on unrestricted funds, but I always thought that, ultimately, a diverse pool of funds could solve all problems. So, we set out to frame fund restrictions as broadly as possible.”

THE EVOLUTION OF A BOARD

While new organizations often have large boards, it soon became clear a United Way-style board of 32 people was not necessary or practical for the Community Foundation. Under Sam McCullough’s leadership, the board of directors began a deliberate process of whittling the board down through attrition to a more manageable number, between 13 and 15 members.

“Sam saw a 32-person board as way too big and way too clunky to support an organization that sought to be agile and flexible and break outside the mold,” Murphy said. “Sam helped me implement the idea of not replacing people when they rotated off the board.”

The timing worked well. As the Community Foundation grew, it no longer needed a representative from each bank – many of which were consolidating and losing local headquarters anyway – or the marquee name quality. It needed a governing board, particularly after new regulations known as Sarbanes Oxley were enacted nationally and governing bodies were held responsible for the actions of the nonprofit organizations they served.

Sam McCullough, Board Chair 2003-2005

Complex Stitches

2006 – 2011

The next five years were exceptionally busy and proved to be a time of reinforcing and learning from growth. There were big steps and missteps, and the Community Foundation emerged from this period leaving no doubt about its role as a leadership organization in Berks County.

The Big Move

In 2006, the Community Foundation was headquartered on the eighth floor of the Berkshire Hotel in Reading with no outside signage and a rickety elevator.

“We quickly learned that before anyone made a major gift to us, they wanted to visit our offices,” Murphy said. “People who want to give want to see physically that this is a real operation that isn’t going anywhere, and rented office space didn’t readily provide that reassurance. Besides, Al Hemmerich had always believed we needed our own space. Very early on, he and I toured the Wyomissing Club as a potential location for the Community Foundation.”

The search for a new space – and a place to hang a sign – soon began in earnest. Finding a space, however, was not as simple as locating a corporate office park and moving in.

“We had strict criteria,” Murphy said. “For example, we wanted to be in downtown Reading to reinforce our commitment to its revitalization and wanted to ensure everyone – regardless of any disability – would feel welcome.”

Murphy and Aitken toured 41 potential sites in downtown Reading, but none of them fit the bill. “A lot of office buildings were way too big. Those that were smaller had big design problems. Most of them had at some point been retail establishments. They were narrow and had no windows and would have been hard to adapt to offices. We considered a law firm’s renovated space in an old mansion in Center Park, but it wouldn’t drive any downtown activity. We really wanted to get meetings that had moved to the suburbs back downtown. We seriously considered the Trexler Mansion on 5th Street, but a study of its suitability came back with an exorbitant price tag.”

Eventually the Community Foundation began to consider new construction.

“I guess you could say we wanted to create our headquarters in the most complicated way possible,” Murphy said. “At every existing building we asked

ourselves how we could maximize the benefit to the community. The answer would have been different at different locations. But, when it came to building a new building, there was really only one option: It had to be a “green” building.

The Community Foundation had been managing the Met-Ed Sustainable Energy Fund for several years and had learned a lot about the environmental and health benefits of green buildings. Since the fund distributed grants across a larger geography, Rick Mappin, the vice president for grantmaking, had worked with progressive builders in other communities to fund green buildings, but there had never been any interest in Berks County. The concept was new and untested locally. The Community Foundation set out to change that dynamic.

But first, the team had to find a location. The most promising site sat at the corner of Second and Washington streets, in a desolate lot between Reading Area Community College and the fledgling Goggleworks Center for the Arts, which had opened in September 2005. When discussions began with the City of Reading, however, it became clear that the Community Foundation wasn’t the only one interested in the site. Albert Boscov, the chair of Boscov’s Department Stores and founder of Our City Reading, had set his sights on the lot to build an IMAX movie theater.

“Albie was a force of nature,” Murphy said. “And didn’t often lose after he set a plan in motion. The city scrambled to figure out how to keep their biggest booster happy while not losing our headquarters to the suburbs. Then the city’s managing director, Leon Churchill, pulled a rabbit from his hat: he showed us a lot at the corner of Third and Court streets that wasn’t listed for sale.”

The lot was actually a collection of nine narrow lots where nine row homes once stood. It was owned by the corporate parent of Auman Funeral Home across the street. The managers of that company were based in Houston, Texas and, after some negotiation that included an agreement to not provide mortuary services or pole dancing, they agreed to sell the lots to the Community Foundation.

With the land secured, planning could begin.

“It turned out that, because no green buildings had been constructed in Berks County, the local architects and builders had no familiarity with how to do it,” Murphy said. “We quickly realized our job just got bigger. If we were going to build a green building and work with local firms, we’d need to help them develop capacity around green buildings. So, instead of hiring one architect and one builder, we hired two. We insisted that the firms with green building expertise

partner with a local architect and local builder on the project.”

It worked like a charm. The Community Foundation contracted with ReVision Architecture from Manayunk, who in turn hired Bill Vitale from Reading-based DesignWorks to handle the local project. For construction, the Alvin Butz Company from Allentown partnered with Burkey Construction in Reading.

“All of a sudden, our community’s green building capacity blossomed,” Murphy said. “Once the local firms had the opportunity to work on a project, they began to implement green building concepts into all their projects. It turned out, for instance, that it was less expensive to recycle everything from a site than to take it to the landfill. And some of the materials, like concrete strengthened with fly ash, were cheaper than traditional Portland cement. And in that way, because it was not only good for the environment but also good for the bottom line, change happened.”

The architects and builders weren’t the only ones learning, however. The Community Foundation set out to educate the community at large about green building concepts. Williamson wrapped a communication plan around the construction process, with weekly blog posts, media stories, and the creation of a monthly public access television series called Building Green. More than one hundred civic leaders attended the groundbreaking ceremony, which included manned educational displays about different aspects of green building and a local foods luncheon, which was another new concept at the time.

“As we were learning, the community was learning,” Murphy said. “We generated excitement about green building, and when we finally opened our doors in September 2009, the interest was incredible. Thousands of people toured our building in the first months it was open. And we took full advantage of it, using signage, a video, and a script to not only provide a tour, but to teach people why green building mattered and how they could implement the concepts in their own lives, too.”

The opening of a permanent headquarters proved to be a turning point in the Community Foundation’s trajectory. It embodied the leadership role the foundation had assumed. The first floor held conference center space

Ribbon cutting ceremony – September 14, 2009

that was free for other organizations to use. Suddenly the building became a place for gathering, for ideas, for important meetings, and for negotiations.

“When we started the foundation, we hoped someone would give us a seat at the table,” Murphy said. “And soon we had a seat at nearly every important community meeting. With the opening of the headquarters, we not only had a seat, we owned the table.”

The headquarters project was not the only highly visible activity the Community Foundation took on during this period, however. The foundation’s increased visibility and reputation for making things happen drew it beyond the day-to-day management of bequests and into political controversy.

The Community Foundation had a policy of taking meetings with nearly anyone who asked, so when a board member asked Murphy to take a meeting with the District Attorney, he didn’t hesitate. The subject of the meeting, however, was unexpected: the District Attorney wanted to use public money to start a charitable fund.

“The District Attorney was fretting that the Reading Police had seized $1.2 million in a drug bust and, although it was his responsibility to determine how and to whom to distribute the money, he wanted nothing to do with it,” Murphy said. “He asked if we could do it through a fund, and we said yes. That, however, did not go over well with the City of Reading.”

The mayor, who was running for reelection, sued the Community Foundation for the money, asserting it was due to the Reading Police Department since they had seized it. The suit had no merit based on the law, which gave the District Attorney the power over the spoils of drug forfeitures.

“In the end, the mayor had to withdraw the lawsuit and we distributed the money according to the fund agreement,” Murphy said, “including a big chunk to the City of Reading to reconstitute its Police K9 Corps.”

The District Attorney’s Anti-Drug Fund was created in 2007 and its final grant was distributed in 2011.

“We learned a lot by managing the District Attorney’s Anti-Drug Fund,” Murphy said. “While we distributed grants that supported some really important projects, it was ultimately a sad episode of the Community Foundation being attacked for purely political reasons in a campaign year. It was difficult, but ultimately, we did our job and we did it the right way and didn’t worry about the noise. And in the end, despite all the public controversy, all people remembered was our name.”

The Community Foundation’s relationship with the city was nothing if not interesting.

“There has always been a strong feeling at the Community Foundation that the fate of Berks County is tightly tied to the fate of the City of Reading,” Murphy said. “But in the early 2000s the city had a structural problem with its finances: it has all the services for the county but was also home to the poorest people who couldn’t be taxed to pay for it.”

That structural challenge led the city to opt to go into Act 47, or bankruptcy.

“We’d been emerging as a leading voice on the whole issue of municipal reform due to our work on farmland and with the Pennsylvania Economy League,” Murphy said. “So, when the mayor set up a blue-ribbon task force, he asked me to sit on it, and ultimately to draft the report recommending Act 47.”

All this work – the construction of a permanent headquarters, the backand-forth with the City of Reading, the increased visibility, and the Community Foundation’s continued growth – was shadowed by something far larger, something that, in 2008, had the power to bring the whole thing down.

“It was the collapse of the financial system that was earth-shatteringly scary,” Murphy said. “Before then, we’d had the great good fortune to live in an era of perpetually positive stock-market returns. That all changed in October 2008.”

Berks County Community Foundation’s policies were tested in the months that followed the global economic downturn and, fortunately, they held. The financial management that Aitken shepherded meant there was a detailed budget available to determine how and where to cut costs to avoid cutting personnel. The investment committee stuck to its spending policy, which used a blended rate based on the trailing twelve quarters of returns. And the program team pivoted to provide grants for basic human needs – to ensure community members were fed, sheltered, and safe as companies began to lay people off.

The crisis also laid bare the reality of the Community Foundation’s business model, which had changed little from its founding. The organization’s primary revenue source came from the management fees it charged on charitable funds, and those fees had never been tested for competitiveness or appropriateness.

“We undertook a very deliberate, thoughtful, methodical process of documenting what drove spending. Franki oversaw a year-long process where every employee accounted for his or her time in fifteen-minute increments. One of our board members, Jerry Johnson, had an extraordinary financial mind and he helped us structure the cost allocation work. We studied the cost structure of

other organizations – like banks and trust companies – to see what they charged. It was a huge undertaking, but we didn’t want to do this a bunch of times, so we were just going to bite the whole thing off.”

The research was eye-opening. The management fees didn’t match up to the routine amount of work the staff did for each fund. The organization was charging too little for scholarships, too much for designated funds. Some funds called for staff time and attention that went far beyond the routine work of recommending a grant and sending a check. So, with the data in hand, the Community Foundation changed its fee structure to better reflect the workload for each fund, and, in doing so, to ensure a stable, ongoing source of revenue that ensured it was paid for the work it did.

“The changes felt dramatic,” Murphy said. “We spent hours and hours trying to figure out how to explain it to our donors who, in the end, largely shrugged their shoulders and didn’t care.”

The business model changes ensured the Community Foundation was prepared to enter the next decade with the resources it needed without having to fundraise for operating support. It also solidified the professionalism of the operation and cleared the path to bring in an outside investment consultant to help the investment committee make educated decisions about how to invest the money that donors had left in our care. The foundation also coalesced around a set of organizational values at this time and developed quarterly performance metrics.

“We’d grown up. We were no longer dependent on anyone else,” Murphy said. “We could stop thinking about the public relations impact of a grant. We could take a position that would not be universally popular, like saying the city should go into Act 47, which was the right thing to do but controversial. We could look at healthcare in the community without having to look through the lens of the hospital systems and what their trustees would say. We became selfsustaining and had a reputation for integrity. We were liberated now. We could seek the truth and tell the truth.”

The final, foundation-changing, event that would happen during this time came amidst the tension with the city and the belt-tightening of the business model work. In 2009, the Community Foundation received the largest bequest to date from the estate of Myrtle Quier, the former publisher of the Reading Eagle newspaper.

LIBRARY TASK FORCE AS A RESPONSE TO ECONOMIC DOWNTURN

In March 2010, Berks County Community Foundation held the first meeting of the Berks County Libraries Task Force, which was created in response to the fallout of the 2008 national economic crisis. Many local libraries had cut hours and were on the verge of closure. The Community Foundation created the task force to ensure library services continued for the community. Williamson managed the task force on behalf of the foundation and task force co-chairs Thomas Flynn, Ph.D., who was president of Alvernia University, and Karen Rightmire, who was president of the Wyomissing Foundation.

“The Community Foundation created the task force to develop recommendations to ensure our local libraries are adequately funded and organized,” Rightmire said at the time. “Libraries are key community resources that connect people to information in a variety of ways that go beyond traditional book lending. It is critical, particularly in this economy, that the libraries remain open and accessible to the community.”

“Libraries are an essential part of the social fabric of our democracy,” Dr. Flynn added.

The task force broke into three teams, each with a specific focus:

The Best Practices Team visited three library systems in other Pennsylvania communities to study how they operated and determine if a similar structure might be beneficial in Berks County. Chuck Gallagher, former editor of the Reading Eagle, chaired this team.

The Reading Public Library Team studied the specific financial and legal issues impacting the Reading Public Library in its role as Berks County’s District Library Center and made short-term (2010-2011) recommendations and long-term recommendations for sustainability. Paul Roedel, former chief executive of Carpenter, chaired this team.

The Community Input team interviewed individuals, civic groups, and others throughout Berks County whose input and support wereor would be - beneficial to local libraries. Sandy Green, mayor of Kutztown, chaired this team.

The teams developed recommendations for a comprehensive 21st century library system and Williamson drafted and published a written report to the public on the findings. The task force findings caught the attention of the Berks County Commissioners, who ultimately took steps to ensure the local library system was adequately supported.

NEWS AS A CHARITABLE ACTIVITY

The Community Foundation has long believed that a strong, independent local media is imperative for a functioning democracy. The first major investment in this area was a 2008 grant to BCTV, a local public access television station. The grant was matched by the Knight Foundation.

The grant transformed the station into a community information aggregator. The original plan, though, was to transform the station into a journalistic media outlet. The Community Foundation funded an editor, a reporter, and a website overhaul. Their work lasted for about a year before the editor posted a story that angered local politicians, who in turn threatened to defund the station. That was the end of BCTV’s journalistic effort until more than a decade later, when they partnered with Spotlight PA to distribute its reporting.

Next, the Community Foundation funded freelance reporters to cover stories that were important to the community and to the foundation, like a deep dive on local hunger, and an overview of where people in Berks County get their water. The articles were well done and important but had limited reach.

From there, the Community Foundation began funding a few nonprofit media outlets that were hoping to expand coverage in Berks County when the Reading Eagle was sold to Alden Capital. The reporting was good and provided increased coverage of issues important to the Hispanic community, but there wasn’t a critical mass or one central place for local residents to see all Berks County coverage.

In 2022, the Community Foundation convened all the media outlets they’d been working with over the years to see if there was a way to pull together the coverage they’d been providing and beef up two areas of coverage where the gaps were the biggest – investigative journalism and municipal and schoolboard meeting coverage. That work ultimately led to a grant to explore the possibility of opening a Spotlight PA bureau solely focused on Berks County to increase the amount of accountability and watchdog reporting taking place.

The Pattern Is Set 2012-2022

The next decade solidified the Community Foundation’s leadership role in Berks County and reinforced the operating structure the organization had created during its earlier years. The business model changes that were made in response to the economic downturn in 2008 created a solid base upon which to grow and thrive.

Between 2012 and 2022, Berks County Community Foundation grew from managing 210 charitable funds valued at $54.3 million to managing 360 funds valued at $120.1 million. The increase in funds under management and asset size expanded the amount of routine work each staff member did.

“We began to grow quickly,” Murphy said, “partly from the seeds we’d planted with potential donors and professional advisors in our early years, and partly from the attraction people had to our community leadership work.”

While existing staff members initially absorbed that growth, it soon became clear that the Community Foundation’s impact in the community could be increased by improving operational efficiency through more sophisticated technology and by structuring grants and program work in a different way.

From the early days of the Community Foundation, the grant staff consisted of one administrative grant manager who ensured grants and scholarships were paid, and a vice president who conducted due diligence and ensured adherence to donor intent. As the corpus grew, so did the opportunity to rethink that generalist structure.

“Heidi had moved from a communication role into our lead grantmaker after Rick left,” Murphy said. “After a few years managing grants, she pitched the idea of expanding the team – and our impact – by adding program officers with special expertise. We’d attracted a critical mass of health and human service funds by that point, and, with the board’s blessing, we decided to test the idea.”

Soon, Monica Reyes joined the Community Foundation as its first specialized program officer, focused on health and human service grantmaking.

“The impact was almost immediate. By having someone who focused on those issues day in and day out instead of dividing time between many different causes, we had the chance to dig in and move the needle on critical community issues like teen pregnancy, oral health, and public health.”

At the same time, the Community Foundation strengthened its policies and procedures and upgraded its technology, all with an eye toward the next twenty years. It decentralized access to its data, ensuring all employees were trained to find the information they needed and analyze it for the highest results.

“We’d built the machine,” Murphy said, “and now we were running it. The culture was built. The structure was built. The software would last until we hit $500 million in assets. The building could house us for at least another forty years.”

The power of that stability and planning was on stark display in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt.

“We’d put all of our plans in place, and this was the first time we had to use them,” Murphy said. “And they worked. Our disaster plan worked. The scenario planning we’d done years before after the September 11th attack allowed us to flip the switch on a Friday at 2 pm and on be running full steam from our houses on Monday at 8 am. At the time, people in the community and government were lamenting the sudden disruption, asking ‘who could have imagined such a thing?’ We had. And we were prepared for it.”

The Community Foundation also had the experience of navigating through the financial crisis a decade before and knew how to switch gears to ensure grants were being used for the highest and most important uses – including saving some organizations from extinction when fundraising events and funding temporarily dried up.

Not every organization could be saved, however, and after two decades helping the City of Reading inch toward a downtown revitalization, working with mayoral administration after mayoral administration, the pandemic proved too much for the Community Foundation’s main partner in the work, Reading’s Downtown Improvement District.

“We’d driven change downtown in the five years leading up to the pandemic,” Murphy said. “We’d invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in programming on Penn Street, bringing people downtown and spawning reinvestment in restaurants and office space. Alvernia University opened a campus downtown as a response to the work. But the effort came to halt when the City of Reading disbanded the DID and did little to replace it.”

Fortunately, there were plenty of other issues and locations in the county on which to focus. As the pandemic drew to a close, the Community Foundation emerged into a new era, one that would be built on the successes of the past and take advantage of the opportunities of the future.

The period after 2022 was a transition in so many ways. The Community Foundation said goodbye to some old colleagues and friends, including Leta Doganes, who had served as the grant and scholarship administrator for two decades before her retirement.

“Like the rest of us, Leta had grown into her role as the Community Foundation grew, and she played a central part in our success. She knew all the players and all the processes and kept the place running smoothly for years.”

At the same time, the Community Foundation added new positions, most notably on the program side. Monica Reyes was promoted to Vice President for Programs and Initiatives and grew the team of program officers throughout 2022 and 2023. Emily Smedley, Cindy Milian, and Kim Sheffer were hired as program officers for Environment and Energy, Health and Human Services, and Lifelong Learning, respectively. Daniel Gombar came on board as Grants Management Administrator.

“Monica had proved the concept that expert program officers could help us have a greater community impact. We doubled down on the model and elevated Monica to oversee the work while redeploying Heidi to create a business strategy that was reflective of our new program team.”

That strategy included new messaging and branding to refocus the Community Foundation away from traditional charity and “savior” tropes. The organization’s story would not be about taking money from the wealthy to save the poor, but about uplifting and inspiring everyone in the community to be the best versions of themselves they could be and, in doing so, improve the quality of life in Berks County. Erica Caceres joined the team as Communication Manager, tasked with sharing this new messaging and branding.

After over 20 years with the Community Foundation in roles focused on communications, grantmaking, programs, and strategy, Heidi Williamson announced her relocation at the end of 2023. Heidi’s role was restructured, and Molly McCullough Robbins joined the team in January 2024 as Vice President for Philanthropic Services.

“The truth is, the Community Foundation is where it is today because we truly believe we can improve the quality of life in Berks County and we can do it in part by promoting philanthropy,” Murphy said. “Our new message and tone reflect that. The words and images we use are inspiring and uplifting, and they encourage people to be part of something amazing.”

As the Community Foundation positions itself for the next decade, it’s leaving a solid, steady organization to the next generation of foundation and community leaders.

“It’s not my place to say what will happen next,” Murphy said. “All I can do is make sure everyone gets developed into the best kind of leaders they can be, and that the board of directors is prepared to guide the organization through whatever the future brings.”

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Berks County Community Foundation develops, manages and distributes funds for charitable purposes in the community.

The official registration and financial information of Berks County Community Foundation may be obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of State by calling toll-free, within Pennsylvania, 1.800.732.0999. Registration does not imply endorsement.

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