The Community Partnership Fund – The Community Partnership located in Rolla, Mo., established this fund to promote awareness of community needs and to work together with citizens and organizations to achieve better results for children, families, and communities. This is  a component fund of the Meramec Regional Community Foundation.

Council of Churches Investment Fund I – This fund will hold long term monies for the Council of Churches.

Council of Churches Investment Fund II – This fund will hold immediate funds for the Council of Churches.

Council of Churches Investment Fund III – This fund will hold funds with a 2 to 5 year time horizon for the Council of Churches.

Fair Grove United Methodist Church – Burnie and Emma Belle Huff Fund – Fair Grove United Methodist Church established this fund to hold a planned gift from the Huff family.

Forget Me Not Fund – Amy Hernandez and the Forget Me Not Ball committee established this giving circle fund to assist with their efforts to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Association. This is a component fund of the Community F of the Lake.

Owensville Area Capacity Building Fund – This fund will support projects and programs that enhance the quality of life in the Owensville area. This is a component fund of the Meramec Regional Community Foundation.

Ozark Foster/Alternative Care Higher Education Fund – Alex and Cathy Primm established this scholarship fund which will assist students who currently are or have been in foster or alternative care pursue higher education. The scholarship is for the CFO’s entire service area.

Vichy Fire Department Fund – This fund will assist the fire department to accept charitable donations and hold short term monies. This is a component of the Meramec Regional Community Foundation.

Wyatt’s Fund – Sam and Missy Frink established this fund to support autism spectrum and/or sensory integration disorders for the Gasconade County R-1 School District. This is a component fund of the Community Foundation of the Hermann Area, Inc.

This year’s scholarship awards and renewals, which are made possible by generous donors, are valued at nearly $925,000, up from about $815,000 awarded in the 2011 scholarship cycle. These represent more than 220 named scholarship funds, with many awarding multiple scholarships to students across southern Missouri.

Information about the scholarship opportunities is available at www.cfozarks.org/cfoscholarships, or students can contact their high-school counseling offices. Application deadlines vary, with the earliest due on March 1, 2012.

The CFO scholarships offer a wide range of opportunities for students interested in public or private colleges and universities, medical or nursing schools, vocational-technical education, and funds designated for students from specific high schools by alumni giving back to their communities.

Some examples of this year’s new scholarship funds include:

The Johnny E. Tubaugh Scholarship Fund will award four renewable $2,500 scholarships to students at Dade County’s four high schools in Greenfield, Lockwood, Dadeville and Everton. The only child of Golden City farmers, Mr. Tubaugh worked in agribusiness and left a bequest for the proceeds of his family’s farm to create a scholarship fund to benefit Dade County students. The Tubaugh Fund is a component of two CFO affiliates, the Lockwood and DACO community foundations

The new Nora Slusher Scholarship will award six $2,500 renewable scholarships to students graduating from Forsyth and Bradleyville high schools as a component of the Community Foundation of Taney County. Mrs. Slusher, who chaired the Roy W. Slusher Foundation until her death in August 2011, left a bequest establishing the fund. She was well known in the Bradleyville area for giving a new pair of shoes to each student once a year.

The Richard & Jeanne Cavender Scholarship for Public Service will provide two $500 scholarships to college-bound seniors in Meramec Regional Community Foundation’s area of Crawford, Dent, Gasconade, Maries, Osage, Phelps, Pulaski and Washington Counties. Richard Cavender retired last year as director of the Meramec Regional Planning Commission and now serves on the CFO Board of Directors.

“CFO-administered scholarships continue to have double-digit growth, benefitting outstanding students in our greater affiliate region of southern Missouri,” Scholarship Coordinator Judith Billings said. “What better way to encourage and support these young people, than to establish scholarships that both leave a legacy and ensure higher education for future generations.”

For more information about CFO scholarship programs, contact Judith Billings at:  jbillings@cfozarks.org; or call (417) 864-6199.

A scholarship for the “underdog” students  in Branson and Hollister.

A Springfield family’s desire to give back to the community that helped their business succeed.

A fund that recognizes an outstanding teacher each year in Ash Grove.

These are some of the examples of planned gifts that a group of estate-planning leaders shared during a recent breakfast at the CFO.

The CFO hosted members of its Professional Advisors Council to discuss how estate planners, attorneys and financial advisors can partner with the CFO to help clients achieve their charitable goals through thoughtful planning about their long-term intent.

Mitch Holmes, with Edward Jones in Branson, helped clients establish a scholarship fund that targets students with ACT scores under 28 and GPAs of 3.5 or lower.

“That’s going to give a whole new group of kids the opportunity to win a scholarship,” he said.

Attorney John Courtney described a scholarship fund benefiting Ash Grove students, which stipulates that one-quarter of its annual distribution be awarded to an outstanding teacher.

“If you think outside the box, you can do some innovative things with scholarship money,” he said.

Diane Homan, with Central Trust & Investment in Springfield, recounted a client who sold his business and wanted to support specific issues in the community that helped his business succeed.

“It helps our clients to give back and makes them feel that they are part of the community,” she said, of helping him create a charitable component in his estate planning.

Randy Saul, Director with BKD Wealth Advisors, LLC, said the CFO’s willingness to work with externally managed funds offers a comfort level to clients who have long-established relationships with their financial advisors. The advisors can still manage the funds, but direct the charitable giving through the CFO’s expertise.

“It’s a win-win for us,” he said. “The ease of a donor-advised fund vs. a private foundation saves a lot of time and expertise needed to set up a private foundation.”

“He was just gone”

The Tornado’s Wrath Claimed Will Norton, But His Legacy Survives

As Mark Norton lay broken in a crowded, chaotic operating room, Dr. Rex Peterson leaned in close to tell him the morphine supply was depleted and he was going to experience more pain than he’d ever known as the surgeon prepared to re-set the bones protruding from his left leg.

But it hardly compared to the even more exquisite pain a week later when Pastor Aaron Brown had to lean in again at Mark’s hospital bedside in the pre-dawn hours to tell him his son Will’s body had been positively identified after a frantic week of friends, family, strangers and search teams looking for the popular Joplin teenager who vanished into the twister.

An aspiring director whose career was kickstarted with more than 2 million views of his prolific YouTube videos, Will Norton was headed to a prestigious film program at Chapman University near Disneyland. He’d traveled to 34 states and 15 countries, and was learning to fly. His tennis team went to state finals and he went to leadership programs like Boy’s State; he was just at one in Washington, D.C., when Bin Laden was killed and he joined the throngs outside of the White House.

“He was always just a great kid to be around. He made good choices, he never gave us a moment’s worry,” Mark says. “He was a good student. He volunteered his time. He made friends easily because he was real considerate.”

In what became one of the most dramatic stories in the tornado’s aftermath, TV viewers, newspaper readers, Facebook and Twitter users the world over would follow the search for Will that began on May 22 with  father and son driving home, toward a party waiting for the new Joplin High School graduate. After the ceremony at Missouri Southern, Mark had sent his wife, Trish, and daughter, Sara, ahead and said he’d ride with Will. The blaring storm sirens had stopped; radio reports said weather was hitting Carl Junction to the north and they were heading south.

They were about five blocks from home, when the initial throes of the EF5 engulfed Will’s Hummer H3, the sturdiest of vehicles, his parents thought, when they’d considered a car for Will. The pressure blew the windows out as they pulled over near Schifferdecker and Sunset  to hunker down, Mark’s arm pressing against his son.  As Will prayed aloud, the storm’s rotation raised and rolled the Hummer, and his seatbelt snapped. When it landed and the blackness cleared, Mark was pinned inside battered, but conscious. Will was gone.

“I called for him and he didn’t answer,” Mark says. “You think life’s kind of over at that point. You pretty well know you’ve lost your son. I didn’t know if my house was destroyed, too. I was having problems breathing. I can’t even say I was afraid to die, even though I thought I was going to. You look over and your son’s gone and that’s all you can think about, really.”

A stranger soon found Mark and rescuers arrived with the Jaws of Life to free him; they applied a tourniquet to his ripped arterial bicep, stapled his torn scalp and loaded him into an ambulance. The paramedics stopped to pick up more storm victims, eight or 10 in all, as dazed survivors helped push debris from the path they cut around downed power lines and through residential yards.

Sara, who returned to the University of Arkansas this fall as a senior studying finance, had been on the phone with Mark as the storm hit the car. She thought she knew about where they would be as the celebration became a search party. Mark’s sister found the car two or three hours later and it was hours more before Trish and Sara found Mark, by then in surgery at Freeman Hospital. When they finally saw him in recovery, Trish fainted.

Mark’s initial fears that Will couldn’t have survived being sucked into the swirling debris gave way to a semblance of hope in the following days blurred by more surgeries, morphine and hazy consciousness. Searchers scoured the massive debris, tracked leads, and checked hospital logs across several states, buoyed by various descriptions of a young man, without ID or unconscious, who might have been admitted or transferred at one distant hospital or another. Anything seemed plausible in those surreal first days. They even dredged several private ponds near the area where Mark and Will had pulled over and the SUV eventually landed, about 300 feet apart.

On day five, the debris having settled in the water, they dredged once more; this time they recovered a young man’s body, identified via dental records as Will Norton. A cousin serving as the family’s contact called Pastor Aaron Brown, who left for the hospital to tell Mark.

Mark recalls a later conversation where he tried to explain to Pastor Brown the loud, clear, but unusual mix of prayers, scripture and praise he heard Will reciting as they roiled in the storm.

“There have been one or two other instances of that from other families,” Brown says. “I think in those moments something supernatural began to happen. God wanted to reassure family members that it’s okay, he’s with me and I’m real and I want you to have hope.”

___

Joplin High School teacher Kristi McGowan, who spoke at Will’s memorial service, says he had a maturity and empathy uncommon in a typical teenager.

“He always thought about the other person and that’s what was so neat about Will,” she says, recalling how he’d pick up donuts for class, bring his car around so kids wouldn’t get wet in the rain, take food to a classmate who was sick. “He always wanted everyone to have their moment. That’s why everybody was his friend. I had him in class twice a day for a whole year and never heard him say anything negative. Never did I hear Will Norton speak a bad word about anybody.”

She also admired how much he appreciated his close family, speaking highly of his parents, eager to talk about family vacations. “He lived a full life. With Will, there were just no regrets.”

For the memorial service  –  held two weeks after graduation day – Mark was able to leave the hospital in a wheelchair, and then go home to continue healing his 15 broken bones, torn and infected scalp and bicep injury.

“I didn’t have internal damage like so many people did,” says Mark, who returned to his job as manager of the Great Southern Travel office in Joplin on July 1. “It was all structural. Compared to what a lot of people had, I really wasn’t that bad.”

On his way home from the service, he got his first look at the devastation to his native Joplin. It shook him, he says, to compound his family’s personal tragedy with the enormous scale of the community’s loss. Still, he is resolute about Joplin’s future.

“It’s fortunate that not more people died when you think about it,” he says. “It could have been thousands. When you look at the complete devastation of these homes, I don’t know how anybody in that path could really survive. But yes, Joplin will be back – no doubt.”

And, in a sense, so will Will. The Nortons attended an August ceremony at Chapman University where a presidential scholarship was named in his honor. Another scholarship fund established through the Community Foundation of Southwest Missouri, Inc., will help other aspiring Joplin media students. The Facebook page set up to track his search still has more than 50,000 followers. Donors are supporting the Humane Society and Samaritan’s Purse in his name. More than 87,000 have watched his sister and best friend Sara’s perspective of the tragedy on YouTube.

“Nothing’s going to replace him, of course, but it helps to know these are things Will’s going to be proud of,” Mark says. “He’d want us to continue to find ways to help and give back.”

The Nortons’ friends, family and faith help sustain them.  As Pastor Brown says: “They are grieving deeply, but they also are able to see the good that has come about through this.”

Mark describes Trish, whom he married 25 years ago in October, as taking things one day at a time while planning to get back into volunteer work and possibly teaching: “She cried every day just when she found out he was going to go 2,000 miles away to school.”

“The good news is we don’t have regrets,” he says.  “It does help knowing that he knows we loved him. We told him that every day. We tried to protect him. We bought him the safest car we could think of … but he was only meant to be here 18 years. It’s just that the kid had so much future and he’s not being able to finish up life like he could have done here on earth. You always have these questions of why. It’s not our job to question why; it’s our job to have faith.”

Memorial  Scholarship

The Norton family established the Will Norton Memorial Scholarship Fund to honor their son. The first scholarship will be awarded next spring to a Joplin senior interested in pursuing Will’s passion for a career in film, TV or media.

Anyone interested in supporting the scholarship fund can donate online at: www.cfozarks.org/donate, or by sending a check noted for this fund to: Community Foundation of the Ozarks, P.O. Box 8960, Springfield, MO, 65801.

To learn more about Will’s life and story, visit his sites:

• www.youtube.com/will
• www.facebook.com/findwillnorton
• www.twitter.com/willdabeast

We join with the many friends and colleagues who are mourning the loss of Mel Saunders, a CFO board member who died Saturday as a result of injuries he received in a two-vehicle crash near Evansville, Ind., last week.

A financial advisor for Wells Fargo Advisors LLC, Mel had served on the CFO Board of Directors since June 2006. He also served as chair of our Scholarship Committee, which selected the recipients of the scholarship funds administered by the CFO.

Mel was just 35 and he and his wife, Theresa, had a two-year-old son, Tyson. He was involved in a number of community organizations, in addition to ours, including the Boys & Girls Club, Sertoma, and the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce. We last saw Mel at the Chamber’s annual membership luncheon last Wednesday, greeting friends as usual with his big, wide smile.

Visitation for Mel Saunders will take place from 1-6 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 6, at Gorman-Scharpf Funeral Home, and again from 2-3 p.m., Sunday, Aug. 7, at the James River Assembly of God Realife Center in Ozark. His service will take place at 3 p.m., Sunday, at the James River Realife Center.

Gary Funk

Former Community Foundation of the Ozarks President Gary Funk will head the Center for Midwestern Initiatives for the RSCT. The CFO created the Rural Schools Partnership in 2009.

The common goal of both efforts is to promote place-based education, which encourages  connections between rural schools and the communities they anchor by instilling a commitment to their culture and heritage among students and educators.

Since its founding, the Rural Schools Partnership has created a network of more than 100 rural schools in southern Missouri, developed more than $4 million in charitable assets to support rural   education, and built the Ozarks Teacher Corps, a scholarship program to return teacher-education graduates to rural communities.

The Rural School and Community Trust is a founding partner of the RSP project. Its Center for Midwestern Initiatives program will work to replicate the program in a region that will initially include Arkansas, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and South Dakota, all of which have strong rural-education networks.

“We will work with colleges in those states that have expressed interest in these concepts and share our goal of recruiting and preparing strong teachers for rural communities,” said Funk, now a Senior Fellow with the RSCT. “We also will work with communities to develop school foundations and build philanthropic assets, which are increasingly important to support schools.”

Robert Mahaffey, director of communications and marketing for The Rural School and Community Trust, said the new Center for Midwestern Initiatives will continue the RSCT’s long commitment to regional collaboration and partnerships.

“This is an ambitious project, and we think it’s a great opportunity to expand a successful model to  strengthen rural education in more communities across the Midwest,” he said.

The Rural School and Community Trust is a national nonprofit organization addressing the crucial relationship between good schools and thriving communities. Its mission is to help rural schools and communities grow stronger together.  Working in some of the poorest, most challenging places, the Rural Trust involves young people in learning linked to their communities, improves the quality of teaching and school leadership, and advocates in a variety of ways for appropriate state educational policies, including the key issue of equitable and adequate funding for rural schools.

For more information about the RSCT and the Center for Midwestern Initiatives, contact Gary Funk at gary.funk@ruraledu.org or Robert Mahaffey, at mrobert.mahaffey@ruraledu.org. For information about the Rural Schools Partnership, contact Julie Leeth at the Community Foundation of the Ozarks at jleeth@cfozarks.org or (417) 864-6199.

Chief Financial Officer Susanne Gray, left, with Hearld and Marjorie Ambler and CFO President Brian Fogle.

The CFO honored its longest-serving volunteer with a resolution presented to Hearld Ambler, one of the original incorporators who has been involved with the Foundation since its creation in 1973.

During a presentation at last week’s annual dinner to recognize donors and volunteer Board leaders, President Brian Fogle joked that the CFO was finally willing to accept Mr. Ambler’s “retirement” after he’d tried several times before.

To a standing ovation, Mr. Ambler accepted a resolution outlining his many contributions to the CFO, including 20 years of service on the Audit/Operations Committee, 12 years on the Board of Directors, and service on the Scholarship Committee.

Mr. Ambler and Fred Hall, who also was recognized at the dinner, were two of the 11 incorporators of the original Community Foundation of Greene County. The first Managing Partner for the Springfield accounting firm, BKD LLC, Mr. Ambler also helped coordinate the CFO’s transition from a volunteer group to a professional organization, serving as a mentor to Chief Financial Officer Susanne Gray, who was the Foundation’s second employee.

He and his wife, Marjorie, also established a scholarship fund that provides a $5,000 annual award. His other volunteer work includes tax-consulting for clients of the Southwest Missouri Office on Aging and service on the Friends of the Dickerson Park Zoo Board.

Approved by the CFO Board of Directors at its May meeting, the Resolution states, in part:

“WHEREAS, Mr. Ambler has earned the admiration and respect for his dedication, focus, enthusiasm, professionalism, sense of humor and hard work;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the Board takes great pleasure in recognizing the significant volunteer achievements of Mr. Hearld Ambler, and herewith expresses its sincere gratitude for the invaluable contributions he has made to the Community Foundation of the Ozarks …”

Front Row (left to right): Neal Grubaugh, Jeanette Doran, Rachel Robertson, Bill Hanks, and Karen Miller. Back Row (left to right): Alexandria Robertson, Elizabeth Robison, Lauren Capps, Caitlin Stratton, Paige McCammon, Carrie Olson, and Margie Beadles

The Finley River Community Foundation hosted a successful first-time reception for its local scholarship recipients at the Ozark High School library earlier this week.

The dessert reception gave donors the opportunity to meet the scholarship recipients in a more informal atmosphere. The Finley River Community Foundation granted $13,800 in scholarships to Ozark High School students this year.

Finley River Board members (left to right): Karen Miller, Rachel Robertson, Susan Haralson, John Torgerson, Mark Woods, Margie Beadles, Cindy Baker, and President Sarah Orr

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The second annual Rural Schools Rendezvous in Thomasville, Mo., last week brought together some 150 educators, students, philanthropists and experts for a day of sharing ideas and inspiration for maintaining rural schools.

The CFO’s Rural Schools Partnership held the conference at the Thomasville Community Center in Oregon County, where CFO Executive Committee member Dusty Shaw hosted the group.

The day then featured a series of presentations and workshops facilitated by Margaret MacLean, Jereann King Johnson, and Robert Mahaffey of The Rural School and Community Trust in Washington, D.C.; Jim Beddow, Randy Parry, and Mike Knutson of the Rural Learning Center in Minor County, S.D.; Lavina Grandon of the Rural Community Alliance in Arkansas; and CFO’s own Carol Silvey, who led a lively discussion on building school foundations.

New members of the Ozarks Teacher Corps were introduced and the inaugural class was recognized. The  2011 Coover Place-Based Grant recipients were honored at the Rendezvous picnic under a big tent.  Eight schools received grants totaling $140,823 for projects that promote the Rural Schools Partnership’s mission of connecting schools and communities through the principles of place-based education.

The grants are made possible by the Louis L. and Julia Dorothy Coover Charitable Foundation Place-Based Education Grantmaking Program of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks in partnership with Commerce Trust.

Here is a summary of this year’s grants:

• Leeton R-X: $20,000 for the School Based Enterprise Bulldog Express, which will expand the community grocery in a larger location and  add a coffee shop/deli.
• Chadwick: $19,989 for a project to study the edible and medicinal benefits of Ozark Mountain herbs and build an outdoor classroom.
• Sherwood-Cass: $20,000 for “The Sherwood Forest,” a campus Master Treescape and Beautification Plan and enhance the carbon-credit awareness and green operational strategy capacities of the students and community.
• Fairview – $19,534 for a water awareness project to train middle-school students about freshwater quality and mentor lower-elementary teachers to teach younger students. The project will culminate a community-wide “Fresh Water Awareness Festival.”
• Stockton: $16,700 for a “Tiger Community Pride”  project to build a pavilion, and a vegetable/flower garden, including  research on Missouri wildflowers and their benefits.
• St. James YEP – $20,000 to start Firehouse Coffee, a student community enegagement center in a 2,500-square-foot old firehouse that also will host summer concerts to generate revenue for the YEP fund.
• Glenwood:  $4,600 for ”Grow Our Strengths,” a project to build raised beds to grow produce to use in the school kitchen and donate to the community food pantry, along with learning to compost school kitchen waste.
• Dora:  $20,000 for ”Dora Digital Story Telling,” where students will complete a “digital story” based on a community inquiry project that analyzes an aspect of the Ozarks.

Guests attending today's event applaud the announcement of the $100 million milestone.

The Community Foundation of the Ozarks today announced that it has surpassed the $100 million milestone in making grants and distributions throughout the Ozarks over its 38-year history.

This milestone reflects grants and distributions made through the CFO’s grantmaking programs, the affiliate foundation community grantmaking programs, donor-advised grants, scholarship awards, and distributions made on behalf of non-profit agency and school partners.

Founded in 1973 as the Community Foundation of Greene County, Inc., the non-profit, tax-exempt organization was formed “to provide a way for the charitable desires of people of large means and small to be given permanent useful expression in furthering the welfare of the community.”

The original incorporators were organized by former Mayor Jim Payne, who later was elected to the Greene County Commission. The incorporators and past and present board members were recognized for their service at Wednesday’s announcement.

The Community Foundation’s first grant was made in 1974 when an anonymous donor contributed $10,000 for a petting zoo at the Dickerson Park Zoo. It operated as a volunteer organization until 1988 when Jan Horton was hired as its first staff member. Later named the first president, Horton was succeeded by Gary Funk, who served from 2003 until July 2010 when Brian Fogle was named the CFO’s third president.

“There are a million different stories represented in that $100 million and all were because of the founding board members who cared about their community, and wanted to leave it better than they found it,” Fogle said. “They have left a lasting legacy.”

Re-named the Community Foundation of the Ozarks, Inc., in 1994, the organization now includes 43 affiliate foundations, 381 non-profit agency and school partners, 1,965 funds and assets of $172 million as of Dec. 31, 2010.

Stories on KOLR and KSMU offer more coverage of the event.

The announcement was made Wednesday to coincide with the Metropolitan Springfield Red-Flag Response Challenge Grant presentations to 19 non-profit agencies that received $217,093 in matching funds. With these matching funds, the agencies raised more than $434,000 to support programs representing early childhood development, hunger, health and human services, education, and housing stabilization.

For the third year, this annual grant cycle has been linked to the “red flags” identified in the Community Focus Report for Springfield-Greene County. The grants were awarded to sustain and enhance successful existing programs that work to address community red flags. After the challenge grants were announced in October 2010, the agencies had until Feb. 28, 2011 to raise their matching funds.

The requests for this grant cycle totaled more than $400,000. The CFO expresses its appreciation to the volunteer grant committee comprised of: Dr. Gloria Galanes and Dr. Tom Prater, Co-Chairs and CFO board members; David Yaktine; Dr. Janie Vestal; Ferba Lofton; Tom DenOuden; Debbie Shantz; and Carol Cruise, with staff support from CFO Executive Vice President Julie Leeth.