Dear UWKV friends,

 

In this season of gratitude and celebration, I wanted to thank you for your continued support and advocacy across Shawnee, Douglas, Jackson and Jefferson counties. Whether you donate money or services or goods, whether you share your valuable time with us, or whether you speak up for the work we do or advocate for policy changes that serve everyone in our communities, thank you.

 

We try to celebrate our volunteers often, especially during Volunteer Appreciation Month in April, but one group of UWKV volunteers deserves a special shout out right now. Thank you to our volunteer board members for their counsel and insight as we continually seek the most meaningful and useful path forward. You can always find our Board roster on our website (https://www.uwkawvalley.org/Leadership_Staff).

 

As our fiscal year concluded in June, we said goodbye to several longtime board members and welcomed new faces and talent to our roster.

Board members who have completed their service are:

Our new members are:

Thank you as well to our three board members who signed on for a second term: Stephanie Flood, Johnathan Sublet, and Amy Stutzman.

 

These volunteers have presided over a successful year that saw new grants issued in Douglas County for family support, childhood success and racial equity. We also continue to support the Eudora Community Navigator position. Shawnee County grantees are in their second year of a two-year grant cycle, and the advisory council is busy preparing new RFPs for a spring release. Jackson County donors continued to support Basic Needs through grants and started their first book distribution through the Junior Leader Reader program created by our Young Leaders Society.

 

In addition, we’ve spent the past year continuing to expand capacity for all nonprofits in our four-county region through professional development and volunteer management and coordination. We are gearing up to offer a Board Leadership Training session in February (Topeka) and a nonprofit professional development opportunity in Lawrence focused on supporting volunteers during the week of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. We will continue to speak up for our sector in front of our local, state and national legislators whenever the opportunity presents.

 

This is just a tiny sampling of the community-building work you made possible in 2024. I continue to be amazed at the incredible leadership of our staff and volunteers to make such a great impact on our community.  We truly are better together.

 

In 2025, I look forward to rolling out our new Strategic Plan. We have taken a lot of time and thought deeply about what we are, how far we’ve come, where we want to be in the future, and what our communities need most from us. A changing philanthropic landscape and evolving community needs require us to be more nimble, bolder, and to take some risks.  We can’t keep doing things the same way just because that’s how we’ve always done it. We recognize and appreciate our traditional role as grant makers, but we also need to invest in ourselves as connectors and convenors. We need to ensure we have a dependable foundation that will allow us to support the broader community for decades to come. We know the possibilities are endless, and I am so excited to see how far we go, together, in the coming year. United is the way we get things done.

 

With gratitude,

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