By Dave Cucchiara
Communications & Program Associate
The Adirondack region’s expansive beauty masks the challenges faced by its residents. While the area encompasses 6 million acres — roughly a quarter of New York State’s landmass — it is home to only 120,000 year-round residents. With an average population density of just 14 people per square mile, residents often drive over an hour to access essential services like healthcare, food, and employment. Compounding these geographic barriers is a stark funding inequity: despite covering 24% of the state’s land area, the North Country receives only 1.5% of New York State’s nonprofit funding. Against this backdrop, 42% of the region’s population lives in poverty or qualifies as ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) families, struggling to afford basic necessities despite working.
In response to these pressing needs, Adirondack Community Foundation launched its Social Safety Net Initiative, partnering with the Rugge Center for Community Impact at Hudson Headwaters Health Network. Through generous funding from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation and the Weatherup Family Fund, the foundation conducted comprehensive research and released the Adirondack Regional Social Safety Net 2024 Report. The post-COVID era had left many health and social service organizations disconnected, with partnerships frayed despite serving communities facing similar challenges. The initiative’s innovative approach goes beyond traditional grantmaking by providing not only multi-year catalytic funding, but also strategic non-monetary resources, including staff support, peer learning communities, and collaboration labs focused on critical issues like food security, housing, and workforce development.
Adirondack Community Foundation awarded four catalytic implementation grants of $150,000 each over three years to partnerships across the region, addressing transportation barriers, workforce development, social isolation, and collaborative service delivery. One example is the United Way-led coalition of 10 social service agencies that now allows families to access multiple services — from rental assistance to food support — through a single point of contact, rather than navigating 10 separate organizations. As one of three winners of the F. M. Kirby Foundation Innovation Engine Grant Program, Adirondack Community Foundation is documenting its model to create a toolkit for other rural communities and funders nationwide. The ultimate vision is to weave together food security, housing, transportation, employment, healthcare, and other critical services into an interconnected safety net that leverages the region’s collective strength to support its most vulnerable residents.
Interview with Jennifer Russell, Vice President of Grants and Programs, and Kim Trombley, Director of Community Impact, of Adirondack Community Foundation
Dave: All right, hello everyone. I’m here with Jennifer Russell and Kim Trombley of the Adirondack Community Foundation. Jennifer Russell is the Vice President of Grants and Programs, and Kim Trombley is the Director of Community Impact. We’re here today to celebrate the big news. Adirondack Community Foundation was recently awarded the F. M. Kirby Foundation Innovation Engine Grant Program prize. They’re one of three winners across our geographic areas of interest, joining Prevention is Key and Braver Angels. So, Jen, Kim, we’ll kick this thing off here. Why don’t you tell us a little about your background and your roles at the foundation?
Jennifer: Hi, I’m Jen Russell. I’m the Vice President of Grants and Programs at Adirondack Community Foundation, and we’re really excited to share more about our Community Foundation and our work. I work very closely with all of our initiatives, and the Safety Net Initiative that we’re speaking about today is a really key area of the Community Foundation’s work. We care all about the communities in the Adirondack region, which is, if you don’t know it, in the northern part of New York State, close to the Canadian border. It’s a really special and unique place of public and private land. We have awesome natural spaces and really unique communities that are all braided together.
Kim: And I’m Kim Trombley, Director of Community Impact with the foundation. I am the primary project lead on our Social Safety Net Initiative, which we’ll be talking about in more detail today. And I also manage our economic vitality and other parts of our basic needs portfolios as part of our work.
Dave: All right, well thank you so much. So, Jen, I’ll start with you. For those unfamiliar with the Adirondack region or your work, help us understand what the social safety net currently looks like across the greater Adirondack region, and why you deemed it in need of strengthening.
Jennifer: Yeah, happy to share. Prior to launching this initiative, we conducted some research to start off. We were seeing in a post-COVID era that a lot of the organizations that served the health and social needs of our communities were a bit disconnected. Everybody hunkered down and was meeting that moment and serving the community, so partnerships were frayed. In our communities, there’s a lot of distance between towns, and you would see different towns that were probably in different counties struggling with similar issues and challenges but not knowing about one another and how they could help one another. That’s sort of the background against this initiative and work.
Because we were seeing this, we said, “Well, let’s do some studies. Let’s see what the most pressing needs are and how might we be able to tackle this as a community?” We interviewed leaders across the region and did a meta-analysis and found, not surprisingly and similar to other rural communities, that access to healthcare, transportation issues — which are huge here — workforce stability and support [services] including access to childcare and affordable quality housing, and food security were our top issues.
Dave: Those are all necessary areas of a functioning society. And I think when it’s so rural up there, they can get spread out and it’s just difficult to connect those dots. So, the Innovation Engine Grant Program itself focuses on three key areas. Innovation, filling those unmet needs like you just discussed, and scalability. How do you feel like your project embodies all three?
Kim: As a grantmaker, we’ve always been really responsive to our community. That’s our role as the Community Foundation — to hear from our community, learn its needs, and respond accordingly and provide opportunity for our region’s nonprofit space and other community partners. With this initiative, we’re really testing the theory of what really deep investment in partnerships looks like when we deploy our resources.
The innovative factor for us was really about not only bringing in multi-year funding and catalytic amounts of monetary resources, but also bringing the strength of the Community Foundation and our knowledge and a bird’s-eye picture of the region, and making connections to the non-monetary resources that are really critical to help partnerships thrive. That’s really the innovation from us as a community foundation in our next evolution as a grantmaker — really bringing in those non-monetary resources and investing deeply into our nonprofits.
In terms of the gaps in our system, as Jen mentioned, our region is so rural. We’re about a quarter of the landmass of New York State, but only have about 120,000 year-round residents. So, collaboration is so important in our sector, especially since we’re always chronically under-resourced as well.
In terms of scalability, we’re really looking to use this model. We’re doing a lot of learning and documenting our processes throughout this process to use as a toolkit for other local funders, state funders, national philanthropy, to show the collective impact of not only this multi-year catalytic funding but also this strategic bringing in of other resources, using it as a case to showcase how important this type of model is for philanthropy.
Dave: And based on the size of the region, this isn’t just something you can write a grant for, hand it off, and they take it from there. Talk a little bit about the structure of this. I know you’re testing this through four partnerships across the region in the form of planning grants, and then those planning grants should be turned into catalytic grants. Can you walk us through one example that shows how this model works and explain the structure of the program?
Kim: Yeah, definitely. As you said, we have four partnerships across the social safety net, and they are as unique as they are. In many ways, they’re doing similar things, like “How can we work better together? What is our collective impact when we work together?” But I think one of the models that’s the most tangible for people to really grasp what we’re trying to do is this partnership that’s led by our local United Way.
That partnership group is organizing a coalition of about 10 nonprofits in our region that are doing a lot of that direct social services work in our community. Think access to housing, access to healthcare, access to transportation. All of these groups have really worked together in an ad hoc fashion before, but this opportunity really gave them the chance to formalize that collaboration across that more regional sector of social services agencies. Now, when a family goes to one of these agencies, that family’s information — with permission, of course — is then circulated among the 10 partners. If one agency is able to offer rental assistance and another agency can do food support, instead of that family having to go to 10 agencies, they can go to one and receive the services of all 10. This has really not only helped our families to become more stable and holistically solve their problems while they’re still problems and not crises, but it’s actually even saved our organizations some time and resources on the back end because they’re holistically solving problems instead of providing just one-off Band-Aid solutions.
Dave: That’s great. I know the Community Foundation model, but this is different. The Adirondack Community Foundation staff really plays a big role in walking some of these partnerships to fruition. What’s the importance of that cross-sector collaboration, and what is the staff doing to help them along the way?
Jennifer: I’m happy to jump back in. As we were framing the various challenges that we’re seeing in the region, it is across sectors, and having the space for people to come together is ensuring that they’re not existing in silos. We’ve convened our players together, which led to these partnership groups where you have different expertise coming together and leaning in to support our communities.
That said, sometimes you also need to dive deep into a particular area. In this initiative, with the support from the Kirby Foundation, we’re able to continue and extend some of those collaboration labs and opportunities to really dive in — still cross-sector — into specific topics. In February, we’re going to take a deep dive into food security with the different actors in the region and run a mini collaboration lab to really spur new ideas and unique ways for us to look at food security at a time when there’s great instability and really get those partners together.
We’ve got convenings. We have these small collaboration labs. For partnership groups that we are supporting with multi-year catalytic grants, we do quarterly check-ins and convenings with them, so they have their own peer learning community and are supporting each other as they’re facing challenges or celebrating different milestones that they hit. From supporting a group of grantees to still trying to bring that partnership energy to new spaces, we have a lot of exciting things on the radar.
Dave: Nice. And to that point, this isn’t a project that is about to begin. This is a project that’s certainly already underway. The planning grants have been dispersed. So, with this new infusion of funding, what becomes possible that wasn’t possible before?
Jennifer: Certainly, those collaboration labs are something that are new, and we’re really just starting the first one. We’re really excited over the next couple of years to dive deep into a couple topics like education and career pathways, food security, and housing a little bit deeper and really support continued focus and collaboration.
I think this opportunity is also allowing us to do more learning and documenting of the model that we have. As you mentioned, we were just a year into it and starting, but really being able to analyze and evaluate and understand it in a way that is shareable for other communities, and also that we could potentially leverage this in other spaces within the Foundation’s work and with partners regionally. We’re really excited to just have more resources to be able to do that.
Dave: Yeah, and replicate this in other geographies, right? I feel like if this is successful, this is something that other foundations, other community foundations in other geographies could learn from. And there’s going to be a toolkit at the end of this that you’ll disperse?
Kim: Yes, definitely. That is our hope and dream with this — that it does scale beyond us and helps inform philanthropy beyond the Adirondack region. And I think too, what we’re also really excited about with this opportunity is we’re able to extend this program for an additional year. It probably won’t look exactly like this format. We like to learn, we like to ideate, we like to continue to be responsive as a community foundation. So, this allows us to extend our learnings and extend our opportunities for our community members into even a fourth year of implementation.
Dave: Great. So, what’s the end game here? Five years from now, what does success look like to you in the Adirondacks? How do they benefit from a project of this scale?
Kim: The Adirondacks, we’ve always been really collaborative, but this has really been an opportunity to help encourage more formal collaboration between all of our partners, really through our leadership cohort of not only our 30-ish grantees that are part of the four catalytic grants that we’re offering, but also through all of these convenings that we’re planning to do over the next several years. I’m hoping to just really start building this truly collaborative nonprofit sector here in our vast rural region and create a culture of learning and peer sharing that will help improve operations across our sector.
Jennifer: And I’ll add on — we’re hoping to see, and for the partnerships to see, that they’re really able to increase access to services, or efficiency of service, or depth of services, and that taking the time and having the resources to think differently about the work, to think differently about partnerships and try a big idea and be supported to try a big idea, can actually help support our community and meet more community needs.
Dave: So, for people, either full-time residents of the Adirondacks or people who commonly vacation in the Adirondacks, how can these folks support your work moving forward?
Jennifer: We are certainly very place-based. We love the Adirondacks and we love people who love the Adirondacks, whether they live here, visit here, or travel here. We have a really robust website that people can connect with us and learn more. It’s adkcommunityfoundation.org. We also host events and convenings to share community issues and topics. We do have a page up about this particular initiative with all of the partners listed, and we definitely encourage connection with any of those partners and their resources, so they’re listed on our site as well. I’m happy to share some links and follow up and chat with anybody about this work.
Dave: Well, Kim, Jen, I really appreciate the time, and I know I speak on behalf of the board and the staff — we couldn’t be more excited to watch this project take shape. Whether you live in the Adirondacks or whether you vacation there, I think this will have a significant impact on the community. With that, I’ll let you go. I really appreciate the time and thank you for all you do.
Jennifer: Thank you, Kirby Foundation. Really awesome to partner with you in this work. We’re so excited. Thank you.
