Food for 250 hungry kids. Arkansas Rice Depot’s Food For Kids program provides food to children having problems in school due to hunger at home. In 2011, Carroll County Community Foundation’s Youth Advisory Council made a grant to support the Food For Kids program at eight schools in their county. About 250 Carroll County children are served by the program, which sends home kid-friendly food items in backpacks so kids can feed themselves with full anonymity.

Connecting 2 nonprofits for greater impact. In spring 2011, Clark County Community Foundation made grants to two organizations with similar missions: Arkadelphia High School EAST Lab students wanted to embroider personalized backpacks for K-8 students who couldn’t afford their own, and Men United needed support to provide school supplies for kids with economic needs. CCCF worked to help connect Men United and EAST to distribute school supplies and backpacks.

600 aspiring musicians. In 2011, the South Arkansas Symphony Society brought Carnegie Hall to the classroom. Six hundred Magnolia School District Students in grades 4 through 6 learned to play the recorder using a curriculum developed at the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. Columbia County Community Foundation provided a grant to purchase recorders for the students. The semester culminated with a live, interactive concert where the kids played along with the South Arkansas Symphony.

9 grants for education. In 2011, Conway County Community Foundation made local education a priority, providing nine grants totaling $15,230 to schools and educational organizations. Grants supported a variety of needs, ranging from science lab renovations and electronic readers to equipment for a vocational education program and college scholarships for single parents.

50 percent fewer interviews for abused children. In the course of a child abuse investigation, a child may have to tell his/her story 10 or more times to various adults involved in the case. The Northeast Arkansas Children’s Advocacy Center provides a safe place where forensic interviews can be recorded on videotape, reducing by up to 50 percent the number of times children must be interviewed. Craighead County Community Foundation was proud to fund the purchase of indispensable video equipment used to record interviews.

3 years, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath. $10,000 from the Endowment Foundation of Cross County’s special housing endowment helped put the final nails, screws and boards in place for the county’s third Habitat for Humanity house in 10 years. After about three years of fundraising, Habitat was able to welcome Debbie Watts and her granddaughter Lois to their new home.

Digital art for 1,380 students. In 2011, the McGehee and Dumas school districts received thousands of dollars in art supplies from the Thea Foundation to encourage creativity and nurture students’ artistic abilities. In addition to paint, brushes, modeling clay, pencils and other traditional art supplies, the Thea Foundation was also able to include a technology packet of digital cameras and memory cards for each school, thanks to a grant from Delta Area Community Foundation.

Making a difference, 1 life at a time. The very first recipient of the Phillip Weaver Scholarship Fund through the Community Foundation of Faulkner County, Craig Hill graduated from the University of Central Arkansas and now owns his own physical therapy practice in Cabot. Grateful for the boost the scholarship provided, Hill made a gift this year to build the Phillip Weaver Scholarship so future generations could receive even larger scholarships from the fund.

$100,000 challenge for children. Sometimes patients at Northwest Arkansas’s Centers for Children need more than medical care. To help provide for urgent needs like food, personal care items or gas to get to and from the clinic, an anonymous family of donors at Fayetteville Area Community Foundation issued a challenge to help build the Centers’ patient assistance fund. The donors’ challenge – to provide a dollar-for-dollar match for donations to the fund up to $100,000 total – is helping to raise awareness and support for this critical need.

4 new scholarships for Fort Smith students. He was president of the Fort Smith Public School Board. She was a professor at Westark College (now the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith). The late Jack and Mollie Grober’s lives were dedicated to education, and now the scholarship endowment they established continues to ensure that local students in Fort Smith have the opportunity for higher education. In 2011, the first four scholarships were awarded from their endowment.

1,000 parent volunteers. Clothes, toiletries, haircuts, food baskets, school supplies, parent mentoring – the Greene County Tech School District’s Parent Center is a one-stop-shop for students’ social and academic needs and a model for community engagement. The school provides a staff person to manage the center, but the community contributes all of the supplies. In 2010-2011, more than 1,000 parents volunteered through the center to support the school district. The Endowment Foundation of Greene County was proud to provide a grant to support this innovative program.

Topping 115 members in less than a year. The Hot Springs Future Fund, a giving circle for young professionals in their 20s, 30s and 40s, started in 2010 with a committee of seven. Within a year, the group had grown to more than 115 paid members pooling their charitable dollars and working together to support the local causes important to them. In their first year, these young adults granted more than $15,000 to charities in Hot Springs.

70+ years of Johnson County history. After 35 years in operation, the Johnson County Historical Society opened the doors of its first museum space in 2010. With the recent acquisition of hundreds of documents dating back to the 1930s, the organization has been able to establish a research room, aided by a grant from Johnson County Community Foundation for furnishings and document storage boxes to make the room comfortable and accessible for genealogy researchers and historians.

933 patients served in two weeks. In June 2011, “Taskforce Razorback,” a partnership among numerous state agencies and the Army, Air Force and Navy Reserves, brought free, quality healthcare to Lee County and four other sites in the Arkansas Delta. In just two weeks, military medical personnel provided treatment to 933 patients at the Lee County site alone. The Community Foundation of Lee County supported the Taskforce Razorback clinic with a grant to offset the cost of hosting the clinic at the Marianna Civic Center.

34,000 visitors. Blytheville’s Lights of the Delta, the largest holiday lighting display in the Mid-South, is an important source of civic pride, but it’s also an economic engine for the county. An estimated 67 percent of the 34,000 guests who attended in 2010 came from out of town, and each year many out-of-towners stay to eat dinner, purchase gas, tour Main Street or stay in a hotel. Mississippi County Community Foundation provided a grant to help Lights of the Delta expand its marketing efforts across the region.

500 times faster. Students at Clarendon and Brinkley public schools can now access information online 500 times faster thanks to a $10,000 grant from Monroe County Community Foundation to upgrade routers and servers for schools in the county through the Great Rivers Educational Cooperative. With a 400 percent increase in bandwidth, Monroe County schools not only have faster access to educational resources but are now more prepared for future state benchmark tests, which will be administered electronically.

Doubling their educational experience. Students in Camden Fairview High School’s EAST program use technology to work on real-world projects in their town and are frequently called upon to make presentations to businesses and civic groups. Ouachita Valley Community Foundation provided a grant to fund portable presentation equipment to support the learning taking place both in the classroom and out in the community.

119 volunteers and growing. In 2011 the Phillips County Volunteer Corps (PCVC) was established to help connect people who want to volunteer with charities that need their help. Phillips County Community Foundation provided a grant for a website where volunteers can sign up, search for opportunities to serve and track their service hours. In PCVC’s first two months, 119 volunteers served more than 150 hours!

Health grants for 11 counties. Three years ago, Jefferson Regional Medical Center based in Pine Bluff made a significant gift to Southeast Arkansas in the form of two new endowments managed by Pine Bluff Area Community Foundation (PBACF). These endowments provide a source of funding for healthy lifestyles programs, health screenings and health education projects in 11 counties in Southeast Arkansas. Since 2009, PBACF has been able to grant just under $200,000 from the two JRMC endowments.

1 special horse. Equestrian Zone in Russellville provides hippotherapy for children with physical and mental disabilities. In fiscal year 2011, Pope County Community Foundation (PCCF) made a grant to “adopt” Midget, a therapy horse trained to work with special needs kids. The PCCF grant provides for all of Midget’s food, boarding and medical needs for one year so Midget and her human colleagues can focus on the task of helping kids gain physical strength, balance and confidence.

750 backpacks for kids. Highland First Assembly of God’s Backpack

Extravaganza brings the entire community together to help local kids get ready for school with free haircuts, health and dental screenings, eye exams and of course, backpacks filled with school supplies. In 2010 they served 500 children in grades 1-6, and with the help of a Sharp County Community Foundation grant, they expanded to high school students in 2011, serving an estimated 750 kids.

Providing shade for 2,880 spectators. Youth baseball is thriving in Chicot County, with registration up 50 percent in 2011. The Rodney Angel Sports Complex is a major center of civic life in Chicot County and a place where each ballplayer spends about 120 hours per summer engaged in a positive activity. That’s why in 2011 Southeast Arkansas Community Foundation made a grant to help upgrade the sports facility with new awnings for its bleachers.

Mentoring 45 teen girls. The Alpha Angels Mentoring Group partners girls in grades 6-12 with local professional women to help increase the girls’ self-esteem and school performance. In 2011, 45 Alpha Angels were able to participate in a confidence-building adventure training camp and a children’s

theater camp at East Arkansas Community College thanks to a grant from St. Francis County Community Foundation.

10 percent more for your donation. For the past five years, Texarkana Area Community Foundation (TACF) has implemented a program to encourage philanthropy by adding a little extra to contributions from donors. Any gift up to $20,000 to a scholarship fund or a fund designated to a particular nonprofit organization or charitable field of interest receives an extra 10 percent from a special pool of money at TACF. The program has helped develop more than $380,000 in new donations since 2007.

A 40 percent increase in library patrons. A $300,000 gift from the J.D. and Allena Dryer Family Endowment at Twin Lakes Community Foundation helped the Baxter County Library qualify for a matching grant from the Donald W.

Reynolds Foundation for a new facility. The Dryer Family wanted to support the growth and development of their city, and their gift to the library is accomplishing just that. Visits to the library were up by about 40 percent in the first six months of 2011.

17 YACs give back. White County Community Foundation’s Youth Advisory Council (YAC) members take philanthropy seriously. To decide which organizations to support with grants from their YAC endowment, the group surveyed classmates to find out which causes matter most to local teens and then interviewed grant applicants to learn more about their programs. In the end, the YACs decided to support a hippotherapy program, infant care supplies for new mothers, a summer tutoring program and renovations for a shelter for battered women and children.