In 2014, the Cleveland Foundation teamed with key authorities and advocates to commemorate its centennial by making a significant contribution to the movement. In October the Community Foundation Atlas, the most comprehensive directory of the world’s community foundation movement ever published, was launched.

Ansis Bērziņš, Chair of Community Foundation Movement in Latvia and CEO of Valmiera Region Community Foundation, shared with us how the Community Foundation (CF) Atlas helped illuminate the field during a recent meeting with people willing to initiate new community foundations in Latvia:

I was very happy at the Cleveland Conference to see the CF Atlas launched. We had a grant call in early October for communities interested in setting up new community foundations. The CF Atlas was published a few days before and I knew it was the right time to present it. During a seminar for potential grantees, we used the CF Atlas to show the number of community foundations we have, and for potential supporters of those local communities. For them it was important to demonstrate how large and imporant the community foundation field is. This map with worldwide coverage was very helpful with this particular audience.

We had community people from municipalities and nonprofits in the room and I think it worked very well for them. Community foundations in our country work with very small amounts of money. When you don’t have much money the work might not seem important — at least that’s how it works here in Eastern Europe. This map with global coverage demonstrated that even though we don’t have much money, we do have many colleagues, many peers throughout the world. So in this way the CF Atlas presentation was powerful.

The Community Foundation Atlas maps the individual identities, locations, assets, roles and achievements of place-based and other community philanthropies around the world. Find out more at communityfoundationatlas.org.