The Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation marshals an array of resources to confront unique challenges in one of California’s most beautiful places. While it is a global destination, Tahoe Truckee is also a rural region with no central governmental infrastructure. TTCF essentially functions as a regional hub focused on solving big problems via its three key initiatives—Family Strengthening, Forest Futures and Housing Solutions. Since the summer of 2022, California Local has helped TTCF communicate with stakeholders and expand its reach with a series of Quarterly Impact Reports. Stacy Caldwell has served as CEO of TTCF since 2012. In 2021, she was invited by the Aspen Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to participate in a rural futurists cohort. This is an edited transcript of our conversation... read more.

I feel fortunate that I’m able to make a living doing work that I love. The best part is that every so often, I get to do something that helps make a real change in the real world. Most journalists will tell you the same thing: we do the work in order to have an impact. When I spoke with Stacy Caldwell, CEO of the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation, about helping them with a report to their members and donors, the first thing she talked about was impact. In her introductory letter in the TTCF Impact Quarterly report, she defines what the term means for her organization.

As 2021 wound down in the days after Nov. 30’s “Giving Tuesday,“ the Give Back Tahoe campaign raised $100,000 more than it did over the same period last year. That followed the biggest single day of giving in the history of the event, which was launched by the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation in 2014. In total, TTCF, its donors and participating nonprofits raised just shy of $530,000.

Last Tuesday, 1,675 people visited the website GiveBackTahoe.org, clicked a “Donate“ button, and gave money to more than 60 participating Lake Tahoe nonprofits. In that one day, Give Back Tahoe raised over $214,000. Some of these folks clicked a “Fundraise” button and created, in just a few minutes, their own campaign, which they could deploy to their friends via email, Facebook, Instagram, etc. The inclusion of this social media functionality is meant to turn this web portal into a “collective giving engine.”