Shirley and Craig Stambaugh

Shirley and Craig Stambaugh

Shirley and Craig Stambaugh use the Williamsburg Community Foundation as an information center. “It seems like a nice management tool for us,” Craig Stambaugh said. “It supplies us with information on the different groups that are coming to them that we wouldn’t have known about. If it hadn’t been for the Foundation, there’s no way we would have known those groups were out there.”

Well, they did know the harpists were out there. The Williamsburg Youth Harp Society played at a Ford’s Colony holiday season event in 2006. But the Stambaugh’s didn’t know the group was trying to expand its outreach to play in hospitals and other locations as therapy for patients.

Shirley and Craig Stambaugh set up a donor-advised fund with the Foundation. This allows them to seethe grant applications, such as the one from the harpists for money to buy more harps and pay for transportation. Once the Foundation selects its grant recipients, the list of all grant applications is shared with the donor-advisors, allowing the advisors to contribute to those projects they feel strongly about — such as the harp therapy project. “It’s a great group. It’s young people giving their time as they learn their skill,” Craig said.

The Stambaughs’ express purpose is to fund grant applications that the Foundation can’t because of the lack of the unrestricted dollars it has to give out.

“There are going to be some things we feel stronger about than the Foundation selection committee does,” he said. “They’re trying to distribute across a broad range of needs. Besides contributing to the Foundation itself, we can specify our particular interests.”

Shirley went through her first round of grant applications in June. In the three weeks before the Foundation’s distribution committee meeting, she reviewed the 25 grants with Craig, often reading them on their deck overlooking a pond. The Stambaughs gave money to two groups that didn’t get Foundation general fund dollars in this round of applications, and they added money to a third that did — the harpists.

“Some grant requests are for only modest amounts of money, and that can make the difference between getting started and not getting started. They just need help getting off the ground,” Craig said.

The couple supported the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for many years before they moved here from Ohio to retire in 2005. They continue to support CW, but Shirley said, “Once you move here you want to support other needs in the area. We just didn’t know the organizations in the area.”

Craig said they wanted to give to small, local organizations in the health and human services and education fields, not large national agencies.

The two had never managed their charitable giving through a community foundation before, but they met people in the Williamsburg area who worked with this Trust. Since 1999, the Trust has linked the charitable interests of donors with opportunities for giving and points of need in the greater Williamsburg area. More than 50 Williamsburg-area nonprofit organizations have received grants from the Community Endowment since 1999.

“There’s always more to every organization than meets the eye,” Shirley Stambaugh said. “There are a lot of good intentions and projects out there that just need some additional funding to really make a difference.”