Blue Mountain Community Foundation

Blue Mountain Community Foundation

Founded in 1984, the Blue Mountain Community Foundation functions as a permanent charitable aggregator for Walla Walla County and the surrounding region. Kol Medina took over as President and CEO after serving as CEO of the Kitsap Community Foundation and as Mayor of Bainbridge Island. The foundation's core capital comes from a collection of named trusts and donor-advised funds, including the Clara & Art Bald Trust, the Mary Garner Esary Trust, and the Stubblefield Foundation Grant Program, all of which channel their distributions locally. The foundation's balance sheet holds a mix of endowment assets, donor-advised fund pools, and a direct real estate portfolio. The real estate holdings include a farmland portfolio situated in Walla Walla County and the foundation's own headquarters at 22 East Poplar Street. Grant capital flows into a broad range of community causes — education scholarships, health initiatives, and civic projects — often augmented by aligned institutional partners. The Schultz Family Foundation contributed a $20,000 grant in 2021, and the Seattle Foundation added a $2,500 grant in 2018, indicating a co-investment pattern with larger regional funders who channel capital through this local interface. With a staff lean enough that the board remains central to operations, the organization reflects the community's professional cross-section. Trustee Melissa Clubb serves as Brand Manager at L'Ecole No 41 Winery, while Trustee Lori Asmus is the Chief Nursing Officer for Providence Clinical Network's Southeast Region. Board Chair Cindy Widmer also has ties to L'Ecole No 41 Winery and the Blue Mountain Action Council. The foundation maintains a Summit Society for planned-gift donors, creating a secondary network of future capital commitments. Recent observable activity remains thin, but the board's composition and the lasting land holdings suggest a deliberate posture of quiet capital preservation rather than frequent transactional churn. The foundation's structural differentiator is its concentrated geography. Unlike large community foundations that span broad metro areas, Blue Mountain's mandate is inseparable from a single rural county. This hyper-local focus makes it the default philanthropic infrastructure for Walla Walla's agricultural and vinicultural wealth, giving it an unusual monopoly on place-based giving that national donor-advised fund sponsors cannot replicate.