Now in its 5th year, organization extends reach with new partnerships, programs
Just five years after it was established, the Aurora Public Schools Foundation is maturing rapidly, volunteer board members agree, growing both in its financial value and impact on the community.
That growth has led to some new partnerships with other community-based organizations that may help leverage benevolent giving in a way that broadens support for the Aurora school and its students, according to Dixie Ziegler, president of the non-profit board.
“We kind of started as a baby,” Ziegler noted while sitting down for an ANR interview along with several other board members. “We moved to a toddler and I think we might be a teenager at this point in time, but in all of that there has just been such progression with the other entities that have come together. The collaboration that has happened, whether it’s in the school itself, with educators and students, and then outside as well with the Aurora Alumni Association and a few other organizations, is just so exciting.”
Officially created as a 501(c)3 in April of 2019, the APS Foundation is beginning to better define its role, board members say, while also building a broader foundation on which to grow.
“We started to think about how this should work and realized that there are no two entities more adapted to each other than the Aurora Public Schools Foundation and the Aurora Alumni Association,” said Pat Phillips, a board member with both organizations. “So now the alumni association is under the umbrella of the Aurora Public Schools Foundation, but we contribute and they contribute, which makes it just that much stronger.”
Phillips noted that the alumni group, which celebrated its 75th anniversary this year, has inducted 64 people into its Alumni Hall of Fame, with many of those honorees being current Aurora residents.
“Some of our alumni may go away and contribute in some way, but the people that live here and stay here are the ones that make the difference and keep it going,” she said.
APS Foundation board member Tina Oswald said the new partnership makes sense for both entities.
“We see it as a way to engage and communicate with the alumni association,” Oswald said. “In the past, a lot of the communication was just around A’ROR’N Days and the alumni coming home for that, and this way with the umbrella and joining and partnering with the alumni association, we can communicate with them more often and tell their stories. The students we have today and the alumni are the school district’s story and it’s just a good relationship to engage those alumni in a way that will support the things that are happening in our community and in our school system.”
“We want to position the foundation to be that storyteller,” Ziegler added. “We want to be the voice for the alumni, for the students, and to really be able to showcase the success and talent and amazing things that are happening inside our school district.”
Bigger umbrella
Having embraced the “umbrella” concept in the past few months, the APS Foundation board is now working more directly with several other groups, including the After Prom Committee, a newly created Student Success Fund coordinated by Paige McQuiston, and more recently the high school music department.
“Mr. Frew and Mr. Sodomka (the high school’s vocal and instrumental music directors) came to us and asked the foundation for a couple thousand dollars to help purchase a portable sound system,” Oswald said of a system which will be used by the marching band, show choir and other vocal performances. “My response was, ‘I think we can do better.’”
With the aid of a social media campaign and a $2,000 APS Foundation contribution, the board collected $8,300 and is on target to raise about half of the sound system’s $20,000 purchase price.
“This sound system will have a big impact for our students because so many students participate in our music programs,” Ziegler said. “But then when you take that out in the community and are able to go different places and perform in different places with this portable sound system, it makes it easier for our community to participate. It’s a better product on the field, on the stage or wherever they are performing.”
Preschool programming
Another example of the foundation extending its reach is recent purchases to help support the district’s preschool programming.
“The school board had decided to on-board 12 or 13 students for kindergarten, and as far as space goes we were able to absorb those students in the classroom without making any remodels or renovations,” Oswald explained. “However, by adding that number of students we needed more learning centers for their play time and learning, all of those kinds of things. We needed some more sensory and learning centers.”
The board applied to Hamilton Community Foundation’s Women in Philanthropy and received $3,500 to purchase a Merry-go-cycle and mud kitchen, which are now in use in the district’s preschool program.
“One of the things we really wanted to highlight in sharing this information is just the collaboration that’s happening between the Aurora Public School Foundation and the Hamilton Community Foundation, and their ability to work together,” Ziegler said. “We anticipate that we’re going to see a bit more of that as we go forward and we’re just so very grateful to the community foundation for supporting the kinds of things that the school foundation is doing. They just seem to work so well together and one of the places that we’re doing that is with some scholarships.”
Oswald then went on to explain than an AHS alum recently left an estate gift to the foundation, with the direction that it be used for scholarships or communications. The APS Foundation board had determined that it does not want to compete in any way with the HCF scholarship program, but the boards agreed that it would make sense to create sub-accounts for scholarships based on donor wishes.
“One of our goals was in five or 10 years, in our teen years, for people to recognize that the school has a foundation and if they’re doing estate planning or year-end planning they can think about this foundation as well as the other great foundations we have in our community,” Oswald said. “I’m excited that some alumni are looking at the school foundation as a great way for them to honor an event that might have happened in their life, or something at school that happened in their life.”
Some alumni have begun talking about “brick and mortar projects,” Oswald added, mentioning a barn project (located on 4th Street across from the ag classrooms) which the ag department had to suspend when it ran out of money.
“I am working with the alumni and this donor (who was impacted by the late Irv Wedeking) to get bids for what it would cost to complete the inside of that,” she said of the barn project. “I will pass information along to the donor to see if that is something they would go with.”
Ziegler said she is encouraged to hear that local people are starting to consider the school foundation in their giving plans, especially this time of year.
“We want people to be thinking about us for year-end giving,” she said. “We’ve accepted gifts of grain, so that’s another thing that feels timely in the fall with harvest happening now, and then we’ve just really deepened and widened our ability to accept and manage estate gifts and bring forward a bunch of options. We have some great board members who have a lot of expertise in this area and they have been a great resource for those individuals who want to do that kind of work. We are so fortunate to have Tina on our board and being able to really personalize, whether it’s for a scholarship, estate gift and just being able to match opportunities and people together. I think it is a real niche that the school foundation is going to be able to fill into the future.”