Resilience of Our Community
In November and December, we published a survey and asked you what you saw as the biggest challenges facing the Gunnison Valley right now. Your answers covered the gamut from school bullying to climate change. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that 88% of people identified housing affordability and 40% called out mental health as two of the biggest challenges.
As our community emerges from the last two years dominated by a global pandemic, we’ve weathered a lot together. We’ve lost community members. We’ve dealt with isolation, uncertainty, and fear. But we’ve also born witness to the individual and collective resilience of our community. We’ve seen community members, part-time and full-time, contribute $513,130 to the COVID-19 Recovery Fund. Through creativity, ingenuity, and dogged perseverance on the part of staff and board members, our nonprofit sector has thrived with your support and commitment. Due to necessity, we’ve all learned to collaborate more effectively across government, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector.
What’s Next?
With all the upheaval we’ve experienced, it is fitting that we were due for a new strategic plan at CFGV this year. We’re extremely proud of the effort our board put into developing a plan that recognizes our current realities and sets a new bar for success. Our new 2022-2024 Strategic Plan is grounded in our vision:
CFGV inspires and connects people so everyone can thrive.
We believe that the nonprofit sector, the private sector, our local governments, and each of us as individuals have a role to play in tackling the challenges we face as a community. We believe that in a community as small as ours, our impact can be enormous. The ripple effect of even small actions can amplify our ability to achieve lasting change.
Our role at CFGV includes three key elements to achieve our vision that are captured in our strategic plan:
- Connect resources to community needs: We work with donors to identify their interests and connect them with community needs. The funds we manage amplify the impact of individual donors and support the members of our community who need it the most. We empower community members to come together and help fix some of the challenges we face.
- Be a community leader: We’re in a unique position to bring a wide array of perspectives to the tables where local leaders are tackling our community’s challenges with a focus on the future, and we’re there to represent your interests. We also convene and connect nonprofit organizations, building solidarity and collaboration within the sector and providing educational opportunities for all as well as individualized support.
- Provide stability to meet long-term community needs: We’re uniquely positioned in the Gunnison Valley to be both steady and agile. Fifteen years ago, the Gunnison Area Community Foundation and the Crested Butte Community Foundation officially merged to create the Community Foundation of the Gunnison Valley and their collective work started before that. We have been around long enough to see the cycles we’ve experienced as a community and learn how to best respond to challenges. We’re also nimble and can move quickly without needing to negotiate red tape when immediate, urgent needs and innovative solutions arise.
We are guided in this work by our values: integrity, stewardship, transparency, and inclusivity.
We invite you to join us on this journey over the next three years as we learn more about our community’s needs and how we can address them together to create a community in which everyone can thrive.
Download the 2022-2024 Strategic Plan.
As always, if you have insight, questions, or comments, please reach out. You can reach us Monday-Friday in our office at 525 North Main Street in Gunnison or at 970-641-8837 or any time via email info@cfgv.org
