The Southeastern Illinois Community Foundation (SICF) recently hosted two meetings for community foundations from around Illinois. The meetings kicked off on Wednesday, November 4th with an evening reception at the Fire Fly hosted by the Grand Victoria Foundation for Communityworks grant recipients. Communityworks is a grant program for community foundations to provide matching grants and operating dollars. Community foundations around the state use their Communityworks endowment funds to give grants in the areas of workforce development, early childhood education and land use and protection. The meeting held at the Effingham Country Club on November 5th consisted of a year-in-review and strategic planning session for those community foundations participating in Phase III of the Communityworks program. Both members from SICF participated in the Communityworks meeting.
On Friday, November 6th, SICF hosted the Alliance of Illinois Community Foundations (AICF) at the Effingham Country Club. Approximately 20community foundations, including staff from the Effingham County Community Foundation and the Mattoon Area Community Foundation, attended the meeting to learn about efforts to introduce the Endow Illinois bill again in 2010 that would give tax credits to citizens giving gifts to community foundations. Speakers at the meeting talked about the Illinois Cultural Data Project, options for software for community foundations, and goodWORKSconnect.org, which is a virtual community for nonprofits in east central Illinois.
