News

Textbox Section

Great news! ISAAC Endowment Fund!

If you weren’t at the ISAAC Family & Friends Breakfast on that snowy morning, December 12, you might not have heard this great news.

We have an ISAAC Endowment Fund “under development”!  That means we’re well on our way to creating a fund that will generate income for ISAAC every year!

Can you help?  Your gift will be tax-deductible, of course. And it will help create sustainability for our work together, way into the future.

Just make your check out to: Kalamazoo Community Foundation, and put in the Memo line: ISAAC Endowment Fund.  Mail or deliver it to:

Kalamazoo Community Foundation
402 E. Michigan Avenue
Kalamazoo, MI 49007-3888

We have three and a half years to fully fund it, so it begins to generate annual income for ISAAC. We need to raise $12,000 in 2018, $12,000 in 2019 and $11,000 in 2020. We can do that!   Or as Elder King said at the Breakfast, “Why wait for three and a half years!”

How did this happen?   I discovered that, after working hard for so many years to put money into an IRA (Individual Retirement Account), I am now required to take money out!  And, that if I tell my IRA to give money directly as a “charitable distribution”, it won’t count as income for me, and I won’t pay income taxes on it.  And, I needed to do it by the end of 2017!

I replied to a “Legacy Planning” invitation from Sabrina Pritchett-Evans from State Farm.  She asked me what’s important to me.  I told her about ISAAC and the more I described how ISAAC works, with so many different congregations and organizations working together, putting our faith values in action, creating equity in our community, the more I realized how very important ISAAC is to me.  Sabrina responded, “You know, you could create an ISAAC Endowment Fund!”  She put me in touch with the Kalamazoo Community Fund, we met, and we made it happen!

As I told everyone at the ISAAC Breakfast, I think I was looking for ISAAC my whole life. When I was in high school and college, I went on as many church youth work camps as I could.  The orphans I got to know in Puerto Rico (whose parents had given them up because they couldn’t afford to feed them); and the sharecroppers I got to know in southern Missouri (whose dirt floors in their church and homes showed how little the hard work of sharecropping paid); and the 5th grade girls I got to know in the inner city of Hartford CT (whose families broke all my stereotypes about people in public housing)–these experience made me feel, strongly, that the way the system works is wrong!

Since then, my whole career has been about making the system more fair. As a Religion major in college, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Micronesia, a child care center director for many years, and director of the Interfaith Council for Peace & Justice and member of the City Council in Ann Arbor, I worked on some good, important changes. But it was when I moved to Kalamazoo and discovered in December 2001 that ISAAC had been created by clergy–black & white, Christian and Jewish together–to get trained in community organizing and work on making the system equitable, that was when I knew I’d found what I’d been looking for.

What do you want your legacy to be?  The Kalamazoo Community Foundation can answer all your questions about various ways to give.  The person guiding us in creating this legacy is Julie Loncharte. You can reach her at  jloncharte@kalfound.org or 269-381-4416.

THANK YOU for helping if you can.  It’s thrilling that we are on our way to having an ISAAC Endowment Fund!

Tobi Hanna-Davies, VP for Communications