Q&A with Andrew Rudnick

Please share a bit about where you're from and what inspired your philanthropic journey. Do you have a personal experience or early memory of philanthropy "in action" that influenced you?

My parents — and especially my mother — were donors to and volunteers for the regional medical center and teaching hospital in our area. For my mother, it was almost a full-time occupation, and while I was too young to be a donor, I observed her passion and the extensive time she invested because of that passion.  

As a result, in the back of my mind, it registered that volunteerism and philanthropy were clearly a part of what one does. It made me realize later that the community foundations which organize intergenerational programs with donors and prospective donors are playing a critical role by having family members going through the process of engaging around similar causes and interests. By doing so, they expand and preserve philanthropy well into the future.

In addition, early in my professional career at the University of Houston, among my administrative responsibilities were the institution’s development functions. There I came to understand what private philanthropy could do for a public academic institution; an experience which became an important point in my life that I have thought about in every other role I have served in going forward.

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You are no stranger to community foundations. Tell us about your prior experience with them and what you find meaningful about their work.

I am a community foundation junkie, and the Santa Fe Community Foundation is the fourth community foundation with which I have been involved and in very different communities – be it upstate New York, South Alabama, Sarasota, Florida, and now in Santa Fe.  

Perhaps most notable for me was my extensive time as a board member and a board chair at the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, during which that foundation evolved from little more than a trust to a proactive and widely and deeply engaged entity that became a nexus for a community that deeply needed its active engagement.

It stepped into the 21st Century and found innovative ways to collaborate with other private foundations and not-for-profit groups in order to most effectively tackle critical issues. It did what the Santa Fe Community Foundation now does through its leadership initiatives — which is work to bring to the community’s consciousness issues that are important and need donor attention and support. And that leadership work was not being done in an easy place; it was being done in a midsize/Midwest community having dealt with significant economic decline.

The result has been that the Buffalo community foundation became a critical player in making transformative growth a reality.

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While community foundations hold restricted assets derived from donors, many do not realize that they operate as a nonprofit organization requiring financial support themselves. At Santa Fe Community Foundation, gifts to the Community Leadership Fund (CLF) help support SFCF's general operations. Why would you say it is important for donors to include CLF in their giving plan?

I was at an event early this past summer, at which the new head of The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, spoke about how visual arts institutions, in order to have the full impact that they should, needed to be more than “just buildings where people come to look at pictures.” I thought this was a great allegory to what community foundations are.

Impactful community foundations use their staff and general operating funds to leverage what the donors believe in. For example, they have management training programs for nonprofits to enhance their effectiveness, and they provide guidance for improving the governance in those organizations. They also bring generations of families together around philanthropy. The results are an exponential increase in philanthropic impact.

Leadership is absolutely the right word. Proactive, focused, collaborative; it is what enlightened national foundations do and what community foundations do regionally to expand the support that they get and the impact that they have. And it’s why I strongly believe that that every civic-minded person should be investing in the general operations of their local community foundation.