OVERVIEW

  For ten years, Leaveners Community Foundation, Inc. has provided support to agencies working with traumatized persons who suffer from mental, emotional and physical disabilities or injuries. We have also provided direct services to these persons. Individual recipients of our assistance have ranged from homeless persons with serious and persistent mental/emotional disturbance to victims of the war in Bosnia.  

  Our purposes have been to alleviate suffering and promote healing; to raise awareness of present social problems that create suffering and more insidious, long-term problems for the society as a whole--especially for the disenfranchised and disabled; and, to help remedy these problems through promoting compassionate work and holistic living.  Our influences and sources of inspiration for this work have been  Albert Schweitzer, M. K. Gandhi, Simone Weil, E. F. Schumacher, Kirkpatrick Sale, Thomas E. Powers, and Dorothy Day. 

  These purposes have been carried out by providing support in the form of monetary grants to other social service organizations that are working with the people and problems mentioned in the first paragraph and that meet the criteria outlined below. Leaveners volunteers have provided direct aid in the form of building repair, organizational consultation to service agencies, helping found and staffing a community meals program and a homeless drop-in center, the provision of medical and rehabilitation materiel to war victims in Bosnia, and most recently, founding a center to provide respite and regeneration to health, humanitarian and other service workers.

  Grants have been made to grassroots organizations that provide services in an ethically and socially informed manner, taking into account the psychological and spiritual health of those they help--considerations such as encouraging personal growth, self reliance, and contribution to the common good.  Leaveners makes every attempt to support agencies  that have healthy management-staff relations, a high staff-to-client ratio, a working negative feedback loop, and a mediation system for clients and staff to work out differences. 

  In 2001, Leaveners filed with the Internal Revenue Service as a Private Operating Foundation (POF).  This has meant that most of our charitable distribution is spent on our own direct service work and few grants are given to other nonprofit organizations.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

  Although rooted in Judeo-Christian and Ghandian ethics, Leaveners Community Foundation, Inc. works with people of all creeds and traditions in a manner that respects individual beliefs and dignity (Acts 10:34-35).  In its work, Leaveners does its best to follow the spirit of Jesus' statement about helping those in need because "as you do to the least of these my brothers and sisters, so do you to me" (Matthew 25:40) and the instructions given in Leviticus regarding care of society's disadvantaged. We have also borrowed extensively from the thinking of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Albert Schweitzer. 

  Although we try to let those with whom we work know in some way that we act out of these beliefs, at the same time we observe the practice of encouraging each person to develop their own relationship with the "Higher Power" as known to them.  We do our best to remember that we learn and receive from those whom we help.  It is our hope this orientation creates the common ground and deep mutual concern for the common good necessary for true social change. 

  The name Leaveners comes from the brief parable in which Jesus likens the Kingdom of Heaven to a woman who hides a pinch of leaven in two handfuls of flour "and soon all is leavened."  Though probably considered unclean and rejected by observant Jews for bread on holy days, leaven in Jesus' parable is the catalyst for creating both material and spiritual good. Likewise, Leaveners Community Foundation works with people and problems--and uses methods--that are often overlooked or disregarded by our society.  Stated differently, it is our belief that we will begin to find solutions to our pressing social and environmental problems when we look seriously at the principles and issues that have been neglected or swept aside by modern society in its choice of  values and lifestyle.

  Leaveners' objective is to interweave material and spiritual good in the work it does for others and in its support of the service work carried out by other organizations.  Often the intangible good can only be transmitted through example and personal relationship. As  Albert Schweitzer notes, "Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing." Leaveners intervenes in ways that produce long-term, systemic change where possible and always supports egalitarian, grassroots, cooperative solutions to problems that involve the people needing help. This philosophy has been adhered to in all work Leaveners has done.