HLF Votes to Maintain Grants
The board of the Heritage Legacy Fund recently voted to maintain their grants budget.
As the worldwide economic crisis continues, the effects are rippling throughout the institutions of our society. The damage has been devastating. While individuals have seen the stock market implosion shrink their retirement fund by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, the impact on the capital of some large foundations has been in the tens or hundreds of millions.
These impacts of course inevitably are passed on to others. The Heritage Legacy Fund, for example, is held and managed by the Vancouver Foundation. And while their resources have always been invested conservatively and cautiously, the Vancouver Foundation has nonetheless experienced huge losses over the past year. The effect on the Heritage Legacy Fund has been immediate. The first impact was the cancellation of third and fourth quarter earnings payments in 2008. The Heritage Legacy Fund society uses these payments to provide grants to community projects. The projection for 2009 income payments at this time is zero.
Faced with this dire situation, which could not have been imagined a year ago, the board of the Heritage Legacy Fund society nonetheless at its last meeting decided not to reduce the grants budget. There are sufficient reserves for the time being, and the board believes that the important thing is to maintain the current momentum of the program. The board also does not want to shut the door on applicants who may be facing an even tougher time as other sources of funding dry up as a result of the economic crisis.
So it is business as usual for the Heritage Legacy Fund this year. In the long term, the board is confident that the fund will recover its value and more, increasing the
society’s ability to support community heritage conservation, its primary mandate.
The Board of the Heritage Legacy Fund of B.C. Society approved $110,000 in grants on April 8 2009. Click here to read about the conservation and advocacy projects that received recent grants.
» Funding: Heritage Legacy Fund
