The Oaklawn Foundation presented the Garland County Historical Society with a $200,000 grant on Tuesday to help fund an expansion of its facility at 328 Quapaw Ave.
"We are very grateful to the Oaklawn Foundation for this generous grant," Liz Robbins, executive director of the historical society, said Tuesday.
"We've run out of room to house, preserve, and protect our current collections, much new holdings, and we don't have adequate room for researchers and volunteer workers. Expanding our facility at 328 Quapaw will solve those problems, and the Oaklawn Foundation gift is a major part of our expansion budget," Robbins said.
Dennis Smith, foundation board president, said two things attracted the foundation to the historical society project.
First, it clearly meets the educational component of the foundation's mission, Smith said, and second, even though it is not a large nonprofit, in terms of net assets, it plays a critical role as the archivist for the history of Garland County and Hot Springs.
The Cella family created the Oaklawn Foundation in 2006, gifting the nonprofit organization with $1 million, at the time the single-largest gift ever made to a Hot Springs charity. The foundation was created after Hot Springs voters narrowly approved a measure to allow expanded electronic games of skill at the track in November 2005.
The Oaklawn Foundation is also sustained by a percentage of moneys generated from the gaming expansion. Smith said earlier this year that the foundation received almost $1.2 million from Oaklawn in 2016.
The foundation focuses primarily on two areas: education and aging.
The foundation has awarded $2.172 million in 694 scholarships since 2008. The 2017-18 awards included 115 $3,000 scholarships and three designated $5,000 awards.
The Oaklawn Center on Aging, a program of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the Reynolds Institute on Aging, and the Arkansas Aging Initiative, is also funded by the foundation.
During its first six or seven years, the support the foundation received from Oaklawn "really exceeded anybody's expectations," Smith said, and so it "accumulated quite a bit of net assets."
"The thought was that we needed to get that money back into the community," so the chairman at the time, the late Darrell Meyer, set up a long-range planning committee, that included Smith as a member.
"We felt like we needed to make some substantial grants to selected nonprofit organizations, primarily for their construction projects," Smith said, using the Reynolds Foundation as a model.
The grant awards have included $300,000 to the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts and a $60,000 grant to Garvan Woodland Gardens for a large-scale treehouse project last year. In 2013, the foundation awarded $10,000 to the historical society to help fund its digitization project.
"The idea is to get those net assets that we've accumulated back into the community, because they don't do anybody any good sitting in our bank account," Smith said.
"Our philosophy was that we would identify the nonprofits" that fit the criteria, and then approach them, he said.
"Basically, we're not soliciting proposals from nonprofits to assist in the funding, rather, we're doing it the other way around. We're identifying the nonprofits that we know have major capital expenditure needs, mainly construction," Smith said.
"We feel like we'll get the most leverage for the dollars that we give back to those nonprofits if it's in the form of buildings ... rather than support a program from another nonprofit," he said.
"GCHS is dedicated to preserving our history, making it easily accessible to researchers, and educating the public about our local heritage. We deeply appreciate the Oaklawn Foundation's recognition of the importance of our mission and their help in making sure we can continue to fulfill it," Robbins said.
"We thank the Oaklawn Foundation for helping us to achieve our dream and for the foundation's deep commitment to the welfare of the people of Garland County," she said.
The historical society maintains more than 55,000 photographs and numerous newspapers, manuscripts, maps, books, memorabilia, and other resources about Garland County's past and present in its collection, according to a news release.
In 2016, the society had 2,500-plus visitors or contacts, and presented 44 educational programs to students, civic groups, and the public. It has published 19 books and produces a yearly journal, The Record, the release said.
Local on 08/23/2017