We are honored to be celebrating our first 100 years of helping to ignite change in Western New York alongside our clients. With so many wonderful celebrations scheduled for the year ahead, we plan to keep you informed of our work through a quarterly electronic newsletter.
Celebrating any major milestone – especially one that is 100 years in the making – is an inspiring opportunity. Please read below how we are awarding $1 million to honor local change makers and how you can nominate someone for our Centennial Awards, which we announced on January 29.
To make this celebration extra meaningful, our Board has ensured that this milestone will live on long into the future through endowments in honor of the top four winners. We hear time and time again from our clients that they are thinking about the future: the future of their families; the future of their legacy; and the future of the organizations and communities they care about. In this newsletter, we are going to tell you the story of our first client – George Rand. He had a vision of leaving a gift that would be doing good forever – and today, a century later, we are still making grants in his name according to his wishes.
Finally, we are going to highlight the work we are doing to support our four community goals on behalf of the change makers who entrust us with charitable dollars to address the changing needs in our community. This newsletter will highlight our racial equity work by sharing some of the recent successes of the Racial Equity Roundtable.
We hope you enjoy learning about how we are connecting people, ideas and resources to improve lives in Western New York thanks to nearly 1,000 generous clients and hundreds of collaborative partners.
With gratitude,
Clotilde Perez-Bode Dedecker