By Robert Meeropol, Founder
I retired as executive director 18 months ago, but there’s one last encore before my RFC performance is done. I am happy to announce that we have begun a four-year effort that I am directing to raise $3 million, so that our endowment and reserve accounts will ensure the RFC will be a reliable source of support for our beneficiaries for years to come. This will be my legacy, and its success depends on a sufficient number of you being moved to make it yours as well.
From the moment I conceived of the RFC, my goal was to create a source of multi-year support for the children we benefit. Despite the best efforts of concerned adults, after our parents’ arrests my brother and I had little continuity in our lives. I saw the RFC as solving this problem for other children in similar circumstances by creating consistency, a port in the storm, for our beneficiaries.
I dreamed the impossible: to raise, from nothing, enough to give away millions of dollars in grants to hundreds, even thousands, of children, AND to build an endowment big enough to provide institutional and granting stability. Even that wasn’t enough, however. I also wanted to involve thousands of modest contributors in this effort to form a community of support for the activist families we aid. In my vision, the endowment would generate half our funds and our donors would contribute the rest.
In 25 years we’ve achieved a lot, but when I retired, the size of the endowment was only halfway towards realizing my dream. My hope is this campaign will get us the rest of the way there. The minimum donation is $5,000, although it can be spread over several years. In order to not divert critical funds from our ongoing granting and operating needs, these gifts should be on top of what you already give to our regular fundraising campaigns.
I’m a bit daunted by the scale of this project. I’m asking for more substantial contributions than I ever have before, but we’re off to an excellent start. I am so excited that we have already received two lead donations of $250,000 each (from the Puffin Foundation, LTD and an anonymous donor), and several additional, substantial gifts and pledges to bring the total raised for this campaign so far to $700,000, almost a quarter of our $3 million goal. We have a long way to go, but we’ll get there if we make this our collective legacy. To find out more about the RFC’s endowment campaign, contact me at endowment@rfc.org or call the office at 413-529-0063.