Vermont Community Foundation

The Foundation's president, Dan Smith, oversees the investment team and staff, which manages both a traditional endowment portfolio and a mission-investment program. Investment-committee members are drawn from Vermont's business and finance community. The Foundation directly originates its own impact-investment deals — real estate acquisitions, loans to housing and land-trust partners, and venture-capital commitments — rather than exclusively delegating to outside managers.

It is a community foundation, not a single-family office. Its assets come from hundreds of Vermont families and organizations that have established donor-advised funds, scholarship funds, and permanent endowments at VCF. The original seed capital came from the McClure family, whose newspaper fortune was built by J. Warren McClure, but the Foundation is governed by a community board and serves the entire state.

Deal flow comes from deep relationships with Vermont nonprofits, state agencies, and community-development organizations. The Foundation lends to partners like the Vermont Housing Finance Agency and the Preservation Trust of Vermont, and it identifies commercial real-estate acquisitions through its own community ties. The Hula Fund, for which VCF is the sole limited partner, sources venture deals from the Burlington startup ecosystem.

The Hula Fund is a venture-capital fund based in Burlington, Vermont, that invests in early-stage companies in the Lake Champlain region and broader Vermont economy. The Vermont Community Foundation serves as the fund's sole limited partner, making the Foundation effectively the capital anchor for one of the state's few institutional venture platforms. Hula operates the general-partner function independently.

The Foundation uses both grants and recoverable investments. Its Vermont Mission Investment Portfolio extends below-market-rate loans to affordable-housing developers, farmland-conservation groups, and small-business projects. It also owns income-producing commercial real estate in Vermont downtowns, and it allocates capital to venture investments through the Hula Fund. Traditional grants still represent the majority of annual deployment.

Yes — both are concentrated almost entirely within Vermont. The Foundation's mission is statewide, so its loans, equity investments, and grants target communities from Bennington to the Northeast Kingdom. That geographic focus distinguishes it from most community foundations, which typically restrict impact investments to narrower city or county footprints.

Four named funds sit inside the Foundation's structure: the J. Warren & Lois McClure Foundation (college access and career education), the Samara Fund (LGBTQ+ priorities), the Curtis Fund (early childhood education and child-care access), and the Vermont Women's Fund (economic security for women and girls). Each operates as a sub-fund with its own advisory committee and granting priorities, but assets are pooled within the Foundation's overall investment portfolio.