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The Madison Community Foundation is celebrating the past by thinking about the future.
The charitable trust that administers more than 1,000 funds and awards millions in grants throughout the Madison area marks its founding 75 years ago with 12 months of anniversary grants that will total approximately $1 million. The theme for many of the grants is to challenge the community to consider where it might be in another 75 years.
The first grant helps move forward a project that has created a conundrum for the city for decades — the development of the downtown shore of Lake Monona. A $27,500 grant to the Madison Design Professionals Workgroup will help fund an engineering study for the group’s design for an expanded Law Park and infrastructure improvements around the park and John Nolen Drive.
“They’ve got a dream,” Tom Linfield, MCF’s vice president-community relations, says of the volunteer group of urban planners that has been working on downtown designs since 2008. “It might take 20 years, it might take hundreds of millions of dollars. The next step is to find out the next steps and the rough costs if this idea were to move forward.”
The group’s ideas include construction of a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed boathouse, increased parking, and a tunnel to help divert traffic at the tricky intersection of Wilson, Blair and Williamson streets. The eye-popping part of the plan, though, is not to move John Nolen Drive traffic under the current road and replace it with a park, but to build a terrace above the road and create a park on it.
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“Lowering the street into a tunnel was a non-starter after we shopped it around,” says Tim Anderson, the workgroup’s chair. “We said, ‘Let’s look at this differently.’”
Terraced parks have worked in other cities. In Dallas, Klyde Warren Park was built over a freeway to create a 5.2-acre green space. Chicago’s Millennium Park was built over train tracks and a parking lot.
Anderson sees the group’s design as a longterm plan, implemented over decades and through city processes. The important thing, he believes, is to find out what’s structurally possible and get a price tag on it.
“We aren’t under the illusion that our (current) design is the one that’s going to go,” he says. “We had to do a design in order to take it out to the public and talk about what the possibilities are.”
The MCF grant, Linfield says, is about starting those conversations, knowing full well the results could take decades.
“Monona Terrace took 60 years, Overture took 10 years, the Edgewater took four years,” he says. “We’re a town where the best intentions can take years of planning.”
Big plans aren’t outside the purview of the Madison Community Foundation, which provided $1 million in early funding to build Monona Terrace. In 2016, the foundation gave $1.7 million in community impact grants, ranging from $2,600 for Madison Music Makers to buy instruments for low-income students to $50,000 to the Literacy Network for a new building and expanded programming.
The community grants in their current form are a more recent part of the foundation’s history, which has adapted with the times since the organization was founded in 1942 to help soldiers returning from World War II. But when the GI Bill took care of that, the organization shifted to community support. The Community Impact Fund began in 1991 with an estate gift of $15 million from Marie Graber, whose family founded what is now Springs Window Fashions in Middleton.
The community grants bring much attention to the foundation but aren’t the core of its work. Most grants come from charitable funds, which are administered and invested by the foundation. There were 1,631 grants to nonprofits made from charitable and endowed funds in 2016, worth $8.5 million. The foundation’s total assets are $218 million and the organization manages 1,076 funds. There are family trusts as well as endowments for Madison public schools, local libraries and environmental groups.
“I think people tend to think of us in two ways — that we give away money or, ‘Oh, wealthy people work with them,’” Linfield says. “But anyone can have a fund here. You don’t have to have a famous last name to have a fund here.”
Many funds have area impact, but people who create a fund or estate gift through the foundation can do so for any reason. A professor died and left $2 million to combat blindness in India, Linfield says, and another donor wanted to create an estate gift to help feral cats. Foundation staff make the connections to find the right organizations to fit those missions, in Madison and beyond.
“Whatever change you want to see in the world, we’re happy to try to facilitate that,” Linfield says.
Beyond the monthly anniversary grants, MCF is also trying to encourage 75 new donors to make estate gifts.
“We often say to people when they start a fund here, ‘This will be forever,’” Linfield says. “People don’t really think about forever, though, how generations from now that money can still be funding the schools, the libraries or the lakes.”
The first grant has a second component that also ponders the future — $25,000 to Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters project that creates a collaboration between artists, architects and designers tasked with imagining 75 years from now. Wisconsin Academy events throughout the year will touch on that theme, with a gallery show planned for next spring at the James Watrous Gallery.
It’s all about dreaming and imagining, Linfield says, which is why he believes the workgroup’s Law Park design is a good way to kick off the anniversary. Besides, Linfield has faith the MCF will still be around whenever something finally happens along that shore of Lake Monona.
“We’re in the long game,” he says. “I doubt in 1942 they imagined how different this community would be and that the money would still be supporting it. That’s the beauty of the endowment.”