Twenty years of building community

Published in the Princeton Packet by Pat Summers (October 5, 2011)

Even if we don’t contribute to it, this organization keeps giving to us. It’s the Princeton Area Community Foundation, whose mission is “promoting philanthropy to advance the well-being of our communities forever,” and next month marks its 20th anniversary of doing exactly that.

While every word in that terse mission statement counts, “philanthropy” may be the most meaningful of the 11. Basically, it means “a love of other people,” Nancy W. Kieling says. The organization’s president for most of those two decades, she has a broad and deep knowledge of the community foundation.

 As for philanthropists, those people who love other people, Ms. Kieling stresses that the term goes beyond connotations of the hugely rich, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. “Plain and simple,” she says, the community foundation “encourages all of us to be generous,” and offers a range of ways to do that.

 Then there’s the “forever” word in the mission statement — one easily explained: “We spend time creating long-lasting endowed assets that will be here forever,” she says. 

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