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A Brief History of OCF
A Brief History of Community Foundations
 At the urging of the Junior League, and with help from several prominent Omahans, Willis Strauss, former InterNorth Chairman, and Dale Te Kolste, former InterNorth Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, founded the Omaha Community Foundation. The Foundation is a non-profit organization, incorporated in March of 1982, under the laws of the state of Nebraska. The IRS affirmed the tax-exempt status under IRS Code Section 501(c)(3) in a determination letter dated June 21, 1982.
The Omaha Community Foundation is one of more than 600 community foundations nationwide. It serves Omaha, southeast Nebraska, and southwest Iowa, offering charitably-minded people a variety of ways to touch their community through philanthropy.
In 2002, OCF donors granted more than $31 million to charity, and have granted more than $228 million since 1982. Grant support ranges broadly from human services to the arts to education to religion to the environment, and more.
Credit for creating the first community foundation in the United States is universally given to Frederick Harris Goff, who established the Cleveland Foundation in 1914. In 1908, Goff became the first full-time president of the Cleveland Trust Company. The Trust Company held several small, endowed charitable trusts and was having difficulty making grants in an effective manner. Many of these trusts were restricted to a specific charitable purpose, such as education or health, but others were simply established to benefit the residents of Cleveland. A separate committee (later a corporation) was established to identify the most worthy grant recipients of the income from the trusts. Other Cleveland banks later joined in the arrangement. The multiple-trust community foundation became a model that was adopted in other cities in the 1920s and ‘30s. The eventual grant making structure of these foundations included funds that were unrestricted, designated, restricted to a field of interest, and donor advised.
Newer community foundations, like the Omaha Community Foundation, are similar to the Cleveland Foundation in their grant making structure, but they generally do not hold each philanthropic fund in a separate trust. Instead, they tend to be not-for-profit corporations that manage their own assets in basic accounting entries under charitable fund accounting principles that represent an allocation of the organization’s pooled investments. Today, over 600 community foundations exist nationwide.
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