The year 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the start of grantmaking by the Lake-Geauga Fund, an initiative, supported by the Cleveland Foundation, to meet the often unique needs of communities to the east of Cuyahoga County. By the mid-1980s, when the idea for the fund was conceived, nearby Lorain and Summit Counties had started community foundations, but neither Lake nor Geauga County had such philanthropic support for social services, arts, health care, education and economic development.

Lake County philanthropists John Sherwin Jr. and his father, who were directors of the Cleveland Foundation’s Sherwick Fund supporting organization, approached the foundation with the suggestion that a new fund be created to provide Lake and Geauga County residents with a means to address local needs. Both rural jurisdictions had pockets of poverty (as well as wealth) and faced the onrush of exurban development. Recognizing the idea’s merit, the foundation contributed a $500,000 challenge grant to launch the Lake-Geauga Fund.

With a leadership gift of $250,000 in hand from the Sherwick Fund toward the 3-to-1 match, the Sherwins, assisted by Arthur S. Holden Jr., a patron of Lake County’s Holden Arboretum and a founder of Lakeland Community College, spearheaded a successful fund-raising campaign. By 1989 a seven-member advisory committee of local leaders had been assembled to recommend grants.

In the fund’s first three years alone, more than $1 million was awarded. The list of recipients was wide-ranging, from a new birthing center in Geauga’s Amish community of Middlefield to the new Farmpark of Lake Metroparks. With the fund’s subsequent support of the innovative plans, programs and projects of nearly every local institution and agency of note, the lives of the people of Lake and Geauga Counties have been immeasurably improved by the fund’s grantmaking, which approaches $15 million to date.

The fund’s presence also has helped to promote private interest in giving. Witness the timing of the Lake-Geauga Fund’s grant of $100,000 (matched by a Cleveland Foundation grant of $100,000) toward the renovation of the Nassau Astronomical Observing Station at Observatory Park in Montville Township. When the twin grants were announced in late summer 2013, the Geauga Park District had already raised from private sources more than half of the needed $1.175 million for the project, which will make the observatory even more useful and welcoming to teachers, students and amateur astronomers. The $590,000 that private donors had contributed as of August 2013 came on top of $2.1 million previously raised by the park district to cover the purchase of the observatory from Case Western Reserve University and the acquisition of more than 200 acres of surrounding land.

As its founders intended, the Lake-Geauga Fund has helped the residents of these counties recognize they have the means to take care of their own.