by Jess McCuan / photo by Brent Fleury 

Pat Smith’s job is to help people give their money away. "It’s the best job in the world," she says of her position as president of the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, a 30-year-old charitable organization with around $140 million in assets. Smith, whose corner office in Asheville’s BB&T Building has stunning mountain views in both directions, joined the foundation in 1984 as a part-time accountant. She was named its first full-time executive director in 1990, and that year, the foundation’s assets totaled just over $5 million. Last year, the Community Foundation made some $10.8 million in grants to such causes as improving water quality in Haywood, Buncombe and Madison County rivers and helping public school teachers create hands-on learning projects for their students. One of Smith’s signature projects was starting the Community Foundation’s Women for Women fund in 2005, which earlier this year made $264,000 in grants to local programs aimed at low-income women.

Just because the organization does laudable charitable work doesn’t mean its grants are uncontroversial. In the mid-‘80s, some Western North Carolinians decried the foundation’s first grant to an Asheville Planned Parenthood office. "We received pictures of aborted fetuses and all kinds of letters," says Smith, who notes that the money has always gone specifically toward Planned Parenthood education programs. Last year, the foundation’s Mountain Landscapes initiative, a three-phase project that aims to promote "smart growth" in the seven westernmost North Carolina counties, stirred up longstanding land-use debates. At community meetings last spring, for example, Sylva residents voiced concerns about preserving farmland and appropriate development along ridgelines and steep slopes. Smith says the initiative, still ongoing, has been one of the most complex efforts she’s ever tried to orchestrate. "You can’t put your head in a closet when you’re trying to use the community’s resources for the good of the community," Smith says. "You have to be out there seeing what the needs are and being willing to take that risk."

It’s also a tough time to work in philanthropy. The foundation’s assets hit a high of around $170 million in 2007, shrank to $164 million in 2008 and dipped to around $115 million earlier this year. "The economic realities have changed," Smith says. "People are being more cautious about how they give, how much they give and what they give to."

Smith, a 62-year-old Asheville native, says she planned her departure from the organization long before the recession hit, and she will step down as president on November 1. After putting in long hours at the foundation for 25 years, she plans to tend to her garden and travel with her husband Phil Smith, an attorney. She may also work part time. "A friend said to me recently, ‘I can’t see you sitting at home darning socks,’" Smith says. "I can assure you, I won’t be darning any socks."

The most frustrating is trying to build resources and stretch them across the needs of 18 counties that are very rural and have tremendous needs. We have a population in this region of about 800,000 people. We don’t have a lot of philanthropy. We don’t have a lot of private foundations. We don’t have lot of corporate support.

We have such a fabulous network of nonprofits across this region doing great work. They’re serving so many needs and have really responded to both government cutbacks and the economic crisis. They are out there giving their heart and soul.

We have such an amazing arts community in Western North Carolina… But our funds are created by donors to carry out their charitable interests, and we have less funding for the arts. That has been very difficult… I do feel that we have under-funded the arts. It is just a matter of the funding that we have available.

In my wildest dreams? It’s actually not a wild dream. I know that one day this foundation is going to be [working with] $500 million or $700 million because the hard work has already been done. This is what I would always tell the early boards [of directors]. When I came to the foundation, we had less than $5 million. I would say to those boards through the years, "You are doing the hard work." It was hard for anybody to imagine that we would ever be [working with] $100 million. And now we’ve surpassed that. I believe that’s because that hard work was done and those board members persevered, I believe we’ll be [working with] $1 billion for this region.

I think the best efficiencies come at the nonprofit level. I don’t think the efficiencies come at the government level. But these problems are so vast, they cannot be solved by private fundraising. It has to be a public-private partnership to address these issues. There needs to be better planning about how nonprofits and government can work together.

The best outcomes can come from public-private planning and implementation. I don’t think the programs need to be bigger, they just need to be more effective.

Of course it bothers me…but, that’s life. If I could do anything, it would be to encourage everybody to give back a little bit. If we all gave five percent of what we have to our community, think of what a difference it would make.

To learn more about the Community Foundation of WNC, go to cfwnc.org.