Community Foundation for South Central New York

Community Foundation for South Central New York

Founded in 1997, the Community Foundation for South Central New York channels philanthropic capital into Broome, Chenango, Delaware, Otsego, and Tioga counties. The board includes executives from Visions Federal Credit Union, M&T Bank, NBT Bank, and Southern Tier 8, embedding the foundation within the regional financial and community-development fabric. It operates as a permanent endowment aggregator — donors establish funds, and the foundation deploys grants from the pooled investment portfolio. The foundation’s asset mix spans a locally managed investment portfolio held in Binghamton and an offshore hedge fund position in the Cayman Islands, suggesting a barbell approach to preserving and growing its roughly $46.5 million corpus. Grantmaking flows through donor-advised funds and three branded collaborative vehicles: the Chobani Community Impact Fund, the Racial Justice and Equity Fund, and The Women’s Fund. Chobani, headquartered in the region, uses the foundation as its primary corporate-giving conduit. The foundation maintains professional memberships with the Council on Foundations, PEAK Grantmaking, the New York Funders Alliance, and the Greater Binghamton Chamber of Commerce. These affiliations tie it to national grantmaking standards while rooting its operations in upstate New York’s economic ecosystem. Structurally, the foundation functions as a civic balance sheet — its board is composed of lenders and economic-development officials rather than a single family or private investment committee. That governance model makes it a neutral capital aggregator for five counties, with corporate partners placing community-directed funds alongside traditional donor vehicles.