Kansas Leadership Center

The voices of people who said Pratt County simply didn’t have the population or the diversity for a community fund weren’t the important voices said Dwayne Bryan, executive director of the Pratt Health Foundation.

“That, of course, motivated us to work even harder,” Bryant said.

The voices that mattered most came from some hard-to-find people who said they too could see the vision Bryant had articulated – one of the first regional community foundations in Kansas.

What’s a community foundation?

Bryan had imagined a kind of community chest organization that would fund progressive grant ideas for the benefit of the area. A community fund supported in part by philanthropists but also through donations from the estates of the area’s citizenry.

He said they never wanted to be the first to the door to ask for estate gifts, but that he’d always been amazed by the generosity some people expressed for their community. They were able, in fact, to find people willing to donate their estates.

“We understood that there were a lot of people who were generous in nature and when they were done using their assets during their lifetime, they would want to leave a portion of them to the charity works in the community where they lived and made their money,” Bryant said.

Pratt joined forces with its contiguous counties and Rice County to see if they could build their initially small fund into $10 million.

That happened 15 years ago.

Today, the community fund has $8 million in assets and has given away hundreds of thousands of dollars to rural communities.

Bryan said collaboration was the only way they could build anything of significant size, but they also needed to engage some unusual voices.

“We tried to take apart the mentality of rural people without them thinking we're trying to come in and gobble them up,” he said. “So we tried to find the most progressive thinker in a community, and if they had resources even better. And we asked them to join the board.

“That seemed to be the key to making a regional community foundation work.”

Similar projects have sprung up in Arkansas City, Scott City and Smith Center, Bryan said.

“It’s been fun to see,” he said. “It’s exciting to see that development happen. They’ve seen the vision.”

A few naysayers didn’t think the plan would fly. 

“There were people who said we weren’t big enough; there weren’t enough people in rural Kansas,” Bryan said. “They said, ‘Well, it has never been done.'"

Others, with estate planning businesses, objected to the community foundation offering free estate planning.

That left Bryan digging deeper for those unusual voices, for those progressive thinkers. People who could see the vision. People who shared that vision. 

“We courted them the best we could,” he said. “We told them our story, how we could build a pool of resources we all could benefit from. That as we elevated one ship, we’d raise all of them.”

His only concern had to do with some what ifs. Could he have grown the project faster had he devoted more time to it? How much time should he devote to this beast? What if he’d been more organized? And perhaps most poignant, how do I turn this program over for someone else to run after building it from the ground up. 

Seeing it succeed, however, with the help of so many different voices, carried its own satisfaction.