Gateway Giving

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®
Hello listeners, and welcome to the 3rd episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast! My guest today is Barbara Carswell, the new CEO of Youthbridge Community Foundation. Youthbridge is different than my previous guests in that they are primarily a middle-man, and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible, for charitable donations, rather than the final destination of those dollars.  Community foundations, in general, are organizations that help to facilitate philanthropy by providing a place to park significant funds in order to give the donor time to figure out how to best deploy that capital to make the greatest impact.  Youthbridge certainly does that, primarily by offering donor advised funds, however, they also do so much more. Their stated mission is to partner with donors to help charities in the St. Louis region, especially those focused on children, through leadership, grants and donor services. They achieve that mission in numerous ways:

For starters, they award between $2 and $3 million in grants to mostly youth-based organizations, mostly in the St. Louis area every year. In addition, they help local non-profits with endowment building by offering a match on some of the first funds those non-profits bring in to create their endowments. They also run an organization called Youth In Philanthropy, YEP for short, where they get high school kids together for the purpose of determining how best to grant out around $10,000/year. Perhaps what was most interesting to me is what they’re doing with impact investing in the community and their 25X25 Initiative where they have set a goal to have at least 25% of their endowment invested in impact investments, primarily through Community Development Financial Institutions, CDFIs for short, by the year 2025.  

There is a whole lot of excellent information packed in here for non-profits and donors alike, and so, with that, I hope you enjoy my interview with Barbara Carswell!

Show Notes

• Youthbridge Community Foundation
• About Youthbridge
• What is a Community Foundation?
• Impact Investing
• 2019 Form 990
• 2019 Annual Report
• Financials
• Giving Cards
• Youth In Philanthropy
• Bridgespan Group Grantmaking Pyramid
• What is a community development financial institution?

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®
Hello listeners and welcome to the Gateway Giving Podcast. My guest today is Amanda Laumeyer, the Senior Director of Development at St. Patrick Center. I have never been homeless, and there has never been any point in my life where I have even had to consider the possibility that I might become homeless. It is unfathomable to me, and I imagine for most of you listening, that I wouldn’t have a warm bed to sleep in every night. Because of that, I’ve always had a soft spot for organizations that support people who are experiencing homelessness.

If you listen to the end, you’ll hear Amanda describe the clients St. Patrick center works with and the needs they typically have when the first come through the doors, the nature of their housing first policy, how you should handle panhandlers, and what your donation to St. Patrick center is buying. My biggest takeaway from this interview is that nearly half of the people St. Patrick Center works with to either find housing or prevent homelessness are kids. When you hear the word homelessness, you probably have an image that pops into your head of a single middle-aged man with a disheveled beard sleeping on a park bench, but when you hear that nearly half of all people experiencing homelessness are kids, you quickly realize that most homelessness is invisible, and it is all around us in ways that we don’t realize.

One final note, we had some technical difficulties during this recording, and, as a result, my audio on here is a little off, so I apologize for that, and I expect that will be rectified for future episodes. The good news is Amanda sounded great, so with that I hope you enjoy my interview with Amanda Laumeyer!

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®
Hello everyone, and welcome to the very first episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast! My guest on today’s podcast is Mary Kitley, the Vice President of Philanthropy & Marketing for the St. Louis Area Food Bank. As you are no doubt aware, the coronavirus pandemic has made access to basic necessities a real struggle for 100s of millions of people and families all around the world, and certainly the St. Louis area is no exception. As a result, food pantries have seen unprecedented demand for their services. We have some light at the end of the tunnel now that there are multiple effective COVID vaccines that will be distributed around the world in the coming months, but even after the coronavirus is gone, or mostly gone, the economic devastation the pandemic has wrought will likely take years to heal. With all that in mind, I wanted my first guest on this podcast to be a representative of an organization that was serving a crucial need during the pandemic, and, since the focus of this podcast is going to be maximizing the impact of your charitable donations, one that was serving that need in an exceptionally efficient manner.

If you listen to the end, you will hear Mary go into great detail about how the foodbank operates, who it serves, why SNAP benefits aren’t sufficient to meet people’s needs, the challenges of navigating the pandemic, and what she’s most optimistic about going forward. However, if you only take 3 things from this conversation, I want them to be these 3 things: 1) there are roughly 560K people in the St. louis area who are currently experiencing food insecurity, 2) roughly 70% of the people utilizing the food bank’s services right now are doing so for the first time in their lives, and 3) because the food bank has such tremendous buying power, it only costs them 25 cents to buy a meal. Let me say that last one again; because the food bank has such tremendous buying power, it only costs them 25 cents to buy a meal! So, by all means, donate spare cans that you have in your pantry that you’re never going to use, but, if you care about making the greatest possible impact, as good as it might feel to give physical donations of food, your dollars will go so much further if you let the food bank do the food purchasing for you.

And so, with that, I hope you enjoy my interview with Mary Kitley of the St. Louis Area Food Bank!