What's an Endowment and How Can I Help?
Currently, the Roanoke Beautification Foundation (RBF) pays for small-scale beautification efforts like the hanging baskets and flower bed maintenance through our own fundraising efforts. These fundraising efforts require some great partners like local businesses and residents who donate towards these projects. The funds are raised and spent on an annual basis.
For larger scale projects, the RBF needs to think much bigger. Thanks in large part to former Roanoke resident EJ Richards, the RBF created an endowment in March 2016, partnering with the Huntington County Community Foundation (HCCF) to manage the funds.
The purpose of any endowment is to create a large investment capable of generating annual returns to be used by the organization for it's stated goals (think large scale projects) while not touching the original principal. The RBF's endowment is not large enough yet to start using the returns for our large scale projects. These larger scale projects cannot occur until the endowment is fully funded. The great news...we've made some progress towards fully funding our endowment! The bad news...we have more to raise.
The Main Street Brick Drive is an example of a fundraising activity that has the potential to get us closer to fully funding the endowment quickly.
Once the endowment is fuly funded and we can start to use the returns on an annual basis, we can strat to tackle the large scale projects.
Would you like to contribute to the endowment?