Hendricks County Community Foundation

Hendricks County Community Foundation

Founded in 1996, the Hendricks County Community Foundation emerged from the Lilly Endowment’s Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow (GIFT) program, a statewide effort to build permanent endowments for local grantmaking. CEO William Rhodehamel has run the foundation since 2012. Located in Avon, Indiana, it operates as an accredited community foundation under the Council on Foundations, managing a mix of unrestricted, field-of-interest, and donor-advised funds. Grantmaking flows into education, health, and community development across Hendricks County. Named vehicles include the Hendricks Regional Health Fund — a philanthropic partnership with Hendricks Regional Health, a platinum corporate partner — and the David H. Kiebach Smile Fund, supported by annual memorial events with MD Logistics. The foundation also holds the Lincoln Bank Legacy Fund and the Hendricks County 4-H Foundation Fund. Scholarships are a core deployment channel, directed at local students. Asset management runs through a permanent endowment structure seeded by GIFT matching grants. The Lilly Endowment remains a major grantor alongside corporate partners like Hendricks Regional Health and MD Logistics. The organization participates in the Indiana Philanthropy Alliance and the Greater Avon Chamber of Commerce. September 2023: The Council on Foundations reaffirmed Hendricks County Community Foundation's accredited status (per the Council on Foundations directory, 2024). Its structural differentiator is the GIFT endowment architecture: Indiana community foundations hold matched principal that generates grantmaking income without constant fundraising. This separates Hendricks County Community Foundation from typical annual-campaign nonprofits and aligns it with the perpetual-capital model of larger private foundations, executed at a rural-county scale.