By Olivia Coffin
Contributing Writer
GREEN BAY – The Greater Green Bay Community Foundation — established in 1991 to “inspire and encourage” charitable actions and donations in Northeast Wisconsin — has launched the One Community Fund to raise awareness for urgent community needs.
The foundation launched the new fund to facilitate greater community investment, action and collaboration to address challenges and create change.
President and CEO Dennis Buehler said the critical needs they have identified are childcare and early childhood, diversity and equity, housing, mental health and wellbeing, poverty and financial stability.
They also identify the critical, escalating and additional rural community needs affecting Brown, Kewaunee and Oconto counties.
“There’s a complex systemic change that has to happen to our community, and that requires collaboration and a different level of funding to ignite innovative ideas. We’ve seen that the foundation is advocacy for Brown County and its work in education or housing, the Housing Coalition or connections for mental health. But, we didn’t have a fund that allowed people to pull dollars and get dollars out to those types of collective impact programs. And this fund allows people to come together and put dollars into a fund allowing us to ignite some of that innovative thinking around systemic change,” Buehler said.
“The foundation has been a vital resource to the community for 33 years. We have a bright, wide variety of assets and grant-making programs that we use to address the needs of the community, but the needs of the community certainly vastly outweigh those resources that are available to us at the foundation. So we’re constantly looking to create tools and programs that are responding to those needs in the community.”
The One Community Fund provides a pathway for everyone in the community to come together and support collaborative efforts to address the needs and make a larger impact on the community.
“Anyone can contribute, at any level, to be part of the collective effort to make our community stronger. Anybody can be a philanthropist, anybody can make an impact. And we want to create a tool that allows us to pull those dollars. Whether you’re able to give $10 or $100 or as much as your circumstance allows, we want to create this pool fund that anybody can contribute to, because we pull all those dollars together, the aggregate power of that, and those contributions allow us to do something that the individual can’t, so we want to offer that opportunity,” Buehler added.
“We encourage people to go to our website, www.ggbcf.org; they can go to the give button and then give directly. They can contact our staff, and we can talk about ways they can contribute to the fund or join us in any of the need areas that we’re trying to address — if they’re looking to volunteer time or effort, or maybe they’re part of an organization that’s looking to address these issues — the foundation can be a real connector with that,” Buehler said.
Data and community action around each of the needs is available at ggbcf.org/community-needs.
