Passion & Purpose: Winter 2024/2025
A message from Winter Kinne
One of the hallmarks of the Community Foundation over the years has been our intentional communication with stakeholders: those donors, nonprofits and community leaders without whose generosity and service we could not exist. In my longtime development role, and now as president and CEO, I have had the honor to be a part of those efforts. As the CFO and our excellent communications team have grown, these opportunities have become more frequent, which delights me.
This edition of Passion & Purpose represents another increase in our engagement. Beginning with this edition, P&P, as we lovingly call it, is now a quarterly publication, expanding on our previous single summer magazine. In it you will find the same updates about the CFO and its 55 affiliate foundations spread across southern and central Missouri, as well as in-depth reporting on the impact of our work and the people like you who make it possible.
Our investment in communications is long-standing — in fact, yours truly was the first communications staffer when I joined the CFO out of college nearly two decades ago. The scope of the team has grown over the years. Behind the scenes our communications team oversees internal communications, messaging strategy for everything from current events to financial policies and is a key part of critical conversations about how to best promote philanthropy and its many facets to the people we serve.
But at the end of the day, isn’t excellent communication always about story? This issue of Passion & Purpose highlights the concept of giving circles and the impact that can happen when like-minded individuals use their resources of time, talent and treasure to do more than they could do alone. The most recent example of this is the Springfield-based Generosity Collective. In November this group of 60-plus individuals and households awarded a whopping $144,580 to four nonprofit organizations, selected through a competitive grantmaking process. The Generosity Collective is largely composed of emerging philanthropists in the middle of their careers who see collective giving as a path to greater impact and achieving their own giving goals. It has been an inspiring year, and we look forward to even bigger things in 2025.
Also in this issue we begin “Passion for Progress,” a series of profiles on emerging community leaders across our region. These individuals are taking big steps to make their hometowns better places to live. They are the folks the CFO will need in coming decades — a new vanguard of stakeholders — as we seek to reframe philanthropy as a transformational force in the region. I hope you are as inspired by them as I am.
There is much more here, I hope you will take time to enjoy it. Thank you for your investment in our communities and being part of the CFO family. I can’t wait to share more stories with you in just three short months!
Winter Kinne is president and CEO of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks. This letter is featured in the winter 2024/2025 edition of Passion & Purpose.
