The beauty of philanthropy is its ever-changing nature. As humans, we may gravitate towards routine, but philanthropic work requires the ability to stay nimble and responsive. While our small community foundation is accustomed to rapid change, the Tahoe Truckee community has recently faced challenges we never could have imagined. Just like many other resort communities throughout the pandemic, our population grew while resources became even more limited. When we finally found some reprieve from COVID-19, fires surrounded our community and we lived through the worst fire season on record. Though it can be hard to see as we persevere through difficult days, so much change in so little time has developed an undeniable community resiliency. 

During this time of growth, TTCF’s strategic plan has been our guiding light. It has served us through unexpected challenges that forced us to innovate to get to places we never dreamed we would go. With a growing Staff and Board of Directors, we are expanding our capacity to think bigger and take action.

At TTCF, we celebrate our community’s diversity in the data we capture, the scholarship applications we review, and the constituents of many of our nonprofits. In 2020, our nation witnessed the murder of George Floyd and the growing momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement. We saw this moment as an opportunity to look inward as a community foundation and explore ways that we could better shape our mission to be more inclusive in order to ensure equitable access to resources and decision-making. With the creation of a dedicated Board Ad-Hoc committee and the ability to learn from our on-the-ground partners in the Community Collaborative of Tahoe Truckee and the League of California Community Foundations, we have made some positive strides. These include embracing a learning journey across operations and governance that has covered broad and deep conversations to inform our efforts.  We have invested in translation services for community meetings and events, facilitated a leadership program focused on minority professionals, disaggregated data and ensured diverse representation for our programmatic efforts. We recognize the need for continuous improvement in this work to ensure that we serve our whole community.

As we continued to battle a second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Community Collaborative worked tirelessly to provide critical support to the community against a backdrop of ongoing workforce shortages and significant community need. We were also challenged with wildfire relief efforts, evacuation planning and power outage preparation. The response of the agencies in the Community Collaborative was quick and effective, and highlighted our need to build the necessary infrastructure ahead of future disasters.

Highlights:

• Convened more than 71 meetings, including Resource Sharing Meetings, with 230 participants from 45 different agencies and nonprofits to address timely issues such as COVID-19, race and equity, suicide prevention, child abuse, community wellness, housing assistance and more
• Increased diversity of Collaborative membership by providing English/Spanish interpretation and translation at monthly membership meetings
• Collected and disseminated data on housing, health, hunger relief and childcare on a quarterly basis in order to address community needs and attract critical funding to strengthen Safety Net services

The Forest Futures campaign focuses on protecting communities, building a forest economy and accelerating market solutions to scale and speed forest management. With 2021 being the worst fire season on record, we are approaching this urgent issue both strategically for community protection and opportunistically for the future of our forests and our region’s economic development.

In the last two years, TTCF’s approach to grantmaking has evolved. With an emphasis on trusted relationships, we have developed strong on-the-ground partnerships with regional environmental organizations and began deploying funds in the Spring of 2022 to projects with the most immediate impact.

The housing crisis continued to worsen in 2021, forcing more and more locals to leave the region and posing a real threat to our business community. In June, Mountain Housing Council partners called an emergency meeting to discuss immediate solutions that would help prevent an economic collapse, ultimately deciding to declare an Emergency Proclamation in July. From this, working groups and tiger teams were formed to explore a portfolio of solutions that would provide the greatest impact. Meanwhile, we maintained a focus on the long-term strategy for our region to accelerate housing solutions.