(By Jeff Yost, President and CEO of Nebraska Community Foundation) Earlier this month, my colleagues at Nebraska Community Foundation and I had the pleasure of hosting more than 400 volunteers and friends at our 2025 Annual Celebration in La Vista.
It’s an event we look forward to every year. For one day, we are all under the same roof. The joy is palpable even before the day officially begins. I love to watch as friends from distant corners of our state reunite, their smiles wide and their voices filling the lobby with excitement, laughter and gratitude. I feel truly myself among this network of likeminded Nebraskans, all of us inspiring one another as we build bolder communities and brighter futures for the places we love.
For more than 30 years, Nebraska Community Foundation has staked its future on these brilliant, dedicated volunteers. That’s for good reason. Communities can only be built and sustained by the people who live and work there. That’s why NCF is organized the way it is. We equip community leaders with skills, methods, confidence, success stories and authority to make decisions. Combine this with discretionary resources, like an unrestricted endowment, and the possibilities to positively impact your hometown grow dramatically.
The NCF network has no shortage of success stories that bring to life a phrase I love: we are the people we’ve been waiting for. One of the exciting parts of our work today is witnessing the NCF affiliated funds that have stopped waiting and started doing.
Today, 20 community-based affiliated funds in the NCF network are in a campaign to match a $150,000 (or sometimes larger) Homegrown Challenge Grant to build their unrestricted endowment. These are opportunities to collectively build a community asset for the future.
Five funds, Boone County, Leigh, Sidney, Stuart and Wayne are already celebrating successful completion of their challenge grant campaigns. Each of these funds now has an unrestricted endowment of at least $900,000, with Boone County getting close to $3 million.
Six more funds, Bertrand, Brown County, Calamus, Clarkson, Nebraska City and Shickley, are now in the public phase of their campaign. In Clarkson they capitalized their unrestricted endowment with over $1 million in less than a year! Unrestricted endowments impact your hometown today plus they allow the next generation to dream big dreams. Annual payouts can be used for a variety of purposes, including starting something new, saving something important or adapting to the future.
In 2012 there were two community-based affiliated funds in the NCF network that had an unrestricted endowment of at least $1 million. Today, we have 25! Ten years from now, how many community funds will have $1 million in their endowment? How many will have $5 million? What if your hometown was one of them?
So, what’s next? We believe the answer is the next generation.
In the past five years NCF has surveyed over 4,000 students in 43 Greater Nebraska schools in towns as small as Diller and as large as Norfolk.
Three-fourths reported no negative stigma with returning to or staying in the place they live now 76% feel connected to their hometown 59% said they are somewhat or extremely likely to live in the area they live now as an adult When asked to rank qualities of an ideal community, safety, good schools and proximity to family topped the list. Our hometowns have all of these qualities and so much more.
Today, with rapidly evolving technology and a high quality of life, people can choose to live wherever they want. Is your hometown a community of choice for the students in your high school? What could make your hometown even more magnetic for young people to want to live, work and raise their families in their hometown?
So, just like with our friends and neighbors, let’s invite young people home to cocreate community with us. After all, they and we are the people we’ve been waiting for.
