Kern Community Foundation

Kern Community Foundation

Kern Community Foundation launched in 2000 to connect donors with needs across Kern County. The foundation manages scholarship funds, donor-advised vehicles, and strategic initiatives. Founder Justin Leland remains a board chair, while former President and CEO Aaron Falk departed in December 2025. The board installed Lydia Chaney as 2025 board chair and named Fatima Tulfo interim CEO. Asset pools span domestic equities, international equities, intermediate-term fixed income, and a real estate portfolio held through the Kern Real Estate Foundation. The real estate arm carries mixed-use exposure in Bakersfield and additional locations nationwide. Grantmaking focuses on education and community development, funding scholarships and women’s economic mobility via The Women’s and Girls’ Fund. The foundation participates in the League of California Community Foundations and the Council on Foundations, signaling standard community-foundation collaboration on diligence and co-granting. The foundation’s leadership transition in late 2025 placed Tulfo, its Chief Impact Officer, in the interim CEO seat. No public AUM or deployment figure is available, consistent with many community foundations that do not aggregate assets into a single disclosed pool. The organization does not maintain a dedicated in-house investment team; governance rests with the board and external wealth-management relationships, including Leland’s Moneywise Wealth Management. Kern Community Foundation’s architecture splits programmatic grantmaking from a separately housed real estate foundation — an arrangement that lets the main entity focus on scholarships and donor services while real estate assets sit in a dedicated vehicle. That structure, coupled with deep local roots and the League of California Community Foundations network, gives the foundation a sourcing and co-funding posture distinct from national grantmakers that lack single-county embeddedness.