Baltimore Community Foundation

School reforms in Baltimore City and Baltimore County stand to gain significant financial support under a historic $8 million endowment given the Baltimore Community Foundation that will double its resources to support education projects. The organization plans to announce Friday the establishment of the Mary Ellen Ruff Brush Fund for Education, created by the donation from the female real estate pioneer whose company developed and operated the 465-unit Broadview Apartments at University Parkway and 39th Street near the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus, as well as apartment homes in Towson and Broadview.

School reforms in Baltimore City and Baltimore County stand to gain significant financial support under a historic $8 million endowment given the Baltimore Community Foundation that will double its resources to support education projects. The organization plans to announce Friday the establishment of the Mary Ellen Ruff Brush Fund for Education, created by the donation from the female real estate pioneer whose company developed and operated the 465-unit Broadview Apartments at University Parkway and 39th Street near the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus, as well as apartment homes in Towson and Broadview.

Former Ravens kicker Matt Stover addressed scholarship recipients at M&T Bank Stadium on Friday, emphasizing integrity and a willingness to work. The Baltimore Community Foundation, a philanthropic non-profit that give scholarships to local high school and college students, organized the event in a suite at the stadium. "BCF and the Ravens do such a good job of giving back to the kids," Stover said. "Giving $5,000 a year to each one of these kids is an amazing amount of money, and to be able to do that year in, year out is incredible.

Former Ravens kicker Matt Stover addressed scholarship recipients at M&T Bank Stadium on Friday, emphasizing integrity and a willingness to work. The Baltimore Community Foundation, a philanthropic non-profit that give scholarships to local high school and college students, organized the event in a suite at the stadium. "BCF and the Ravens do such a good job of giving back to the kids," Stover said. "Giving $5,000 a year to each one of these kids is an amazing amount of money, and to be able to do that year in, year out is incredible.

For several hundred local folks, it wouldn't be the holidays without a special visitor flying in to deliver gifts and good cheer. As they mingled in a ballroom at the Tremont Grand, enjoying cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, many of those people marveled at that visitor's dedication. "Isn't it nice that Pam Shriver flies in from her home in Los Angeles just to do this event?" asked Ed Kiernan, general manager of WBAL and WIYY radio. "She really is a special person," added Edie Brown, owner of Edie Brown & Associates, there with her husband, retired dentist Stan Brown.

The Baltimore Community Foundation has announced it will use its $1 million Arts and Culture Initiative to fund programs in arts education run collaboratively between arts organizations and schools. It recently awarded $100,000 to programs run collaboratively between five arts institutions and local schools.* The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Foundation of Maryland received $15,000 to bring instructors to 30 area schools for two-day workshops and to develop additional activities for teachers and students.

The Fells Point Creative Alliance, a nonprofit arts and humanities organization, recently received a $10,000 challenge grant from the Baltimore Community Foundation's Developing Arts Fund. The grant, geared to helping young art organizations broaden their audiences, must now be matched through individual and business donations.Founded in 1994 as a membership organization, the Creative Alliance offers services for artists, publishes a quarterly cultural calendar, and promotes exhibitions, readings and lectures.

THE BALTIMORE Community Foundation was late getting started and puny for too long. A community foundation is the bTC most effective means of putting to work resources left for good causes as the donors intended.Now the Baltimore Community Foundation has, at least, reached the charts. It shows up on The Chronicle of Philanthropy's lists of Top 50 community foundations in the nation in 1995. It stood 40th in assets, with $66,350,953 (compared to the second place Cleveland Foundation's $900,625,208)

Thanks for the great article by Timothy Wheeler ("Maryland Port Administration greening an old harbor dumping ground," May 28) about the restoration of Masonville Cove to an urban nature park and bird sanctuary. The Baltimore Community Foundation is proud to have been an early investor in this project through our 2006 support of an outreach coordinator to ensure that there was community input and participation in the project. The terrific result — a cleaner, greener and more vibrant Masonville Cove — highlights what is possible when the community is given the opportunity to exercise its voice in major development projects.

As a community foundation that pursues its goals through grant-making, initiatives and advocacy, the Baltimore Community Foundation applauds Aaron Dorman's call for philanthropies to engage in advocacy ( "Smarter grant-making," Dec. 21), but we recognize as well the even more pressing imperative of loyalty to donor intent. At the Baltimore Community Foundation advocacy is important, but donor intent is sacred. Mr. Dorman holds up the Annie E. Casey Foundation as a paragon while suggesting that the Weinberg Foundation is lagging in its civic duty by not engaging in advocacy.

Thanks for the great article by Timothy Wheeler ("Maryland Port Administration greening an old harbor dumping ground," May 28) about the restoration of Masonville Cove to an urban nature park and bird sanctuary. The Baltimore Community Foundation is proud to have been an early investor in this project through our 2006 support of an outreach coordinator to ensure that there was community input and participation in the project. The terrific result — a cleaner, greener and more vibrant Masonville Cove — highlights what is possible when the community is given the opportunity to exercise its voice in major development projects.

Mayor Rawlings-Blake has asked Baltimoreans to set aside differences on key projects for the city and move ahead, in the spirit of "Do it Now. " ( "What would Schaefer do?" May 1) We applaud the mayor's leadership on these topics and hope that all of us can invoke our mayor's call "to constantly seek ways to reinvent Baltimore for the future, through hard work, sound compromise and fierce determination. " Diane Bell-McKoy, president, Associated Black Charities; John B. Frisch, chairman, Downtown Partnership of Baltimore; Tom Wilcox, president, Baltimore Community Foundation

It is impossible to know what history will regard as William Donald Schaefer's greatest legacy in Baltimore. But we do know the legacy he sought to perpetuate. Governor Schaefer may be known for the Inner Harbor and Oriole Park, but he was a lifelong champion of Baltimore's neighborhoods, and he put a plan in place, long before his death, to ensure that his particular brand of support for them would continue for generations to come. Governor Schaefer listened to and worked with individual citizens and neighborhood groups even as he devised grand plans for a revitalized city and a prosperous state.

Baltimore lost population yet again — that's what recent census data show. Some see this as a negative, but the Baltimore Community Foundation's response is just the opposite. The smallest population decline in 50 years is a clear and strong sign of progress. It suggests greater things to come and should inspire all who love the city to work together to create a bigger and better Baltimore. It takes time to reverse a city's decline. But the slowing population loss, coupled with many other positive changes, suggests that this can be the decade when the city's population begins to grow again, setting the stage for a comprehensive renaissance.

As a community foundation that pursues its goals through grant-making, initiatives and advocacy, the Baltimore Community Foundation applauds Aaron Dorman's call for philanthropies to engage in advocacy ( "Smarter grant-making," Dec. 21), but we recognize as well the even more pressing imperative of loyalty to donor intent. At the Baltimore Community Foundation advocacy is important, but donor intent is sacred. Mr. Dorman holds up the Annie E. Casey Foundation as a paragon while suggesting that the Weinberg Foundation is lagging in its civic duty by not engaging in advocacy.

Daniel Joseph Siegel, a rising junior at Yale University who taught martial arts to students and faculty, died on Saturday morning after a lengthy battle with brain cancer. He was 22. Mr. Siegel was born in Baltimore and graduated from Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School in Pikesville. A political science major at Yale, he excelled both inside and outside the classroom. He is the son of Janet Berg and Dr. Everett Siegel, a psychiatrist and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The CollegeBound Foundation, which this year will give grants to some 250 college students from Baltimore City, has begun receiving $325,000 pledged by the Ford Foundation over the next three years to support its operations.The money is part of an $892,000 grant from Ford to the Baltimore Community Foundation to evaluate programs helping low-income high school students go to college. Some of that money is going to CollegeBound through the Baltimore Community Foundation.The Baltimore Community Foundation was created in 1972 and is funded with money from businesses and philanthropic organizations.

It was a sad month when the wreckers leveled the old St. Mary's Seminary on Paca Street in the mid-1970s. When the Victorian landmark where so many Roman Catholic priests received their religious education disappeared, its components went everywhere. At one point I owned a Calvert Street rowhouse with a staircase partially constructed from spindles salvaged from this part of old Baltimore. Just as the doors and weathervane were salvaged from the old seminary and put to new uses, its location was also repurposed.