| Dear Ventura County Community Foundation Family,
Last month, I wrote about my experience at the Council of Foundations conference and the idea of connection being its own philanthropic cause, worthy of support, and how the work in front of us is not simply to gather with those who already affirm us. The deeper work is to break bread across difference and discover that we still belong to one another.
My email inbox was flooded with replies and messages expressing a shared concern for how polarizing and divided these times are. Your replies have stayed with me, and they fill me with hope. I really want to thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me, and please know how grateful I am for each and every one of you.
This month, I want to recognize one of our most consistent partners in our community leadership efforts these past many years, the League of Women Voters of Ventura County. The League was among the very first to volunteer when we launched the 2020 Census Complete Count Committee, and last year, one of the first to join the Ventura County Neighbors Support Coalition. This nonpartisan group of dedicated volunteers is committed to registering voters and ensuring everyone is represented in our democracy.
I recently had the opportunity to thank them in-person for their generosity and service, and to speak about the power of community. In my remarks, I shared what I have come to believe after all these years of doing this work alongside you. That Ventura County is truly a generous community filled with people who care. I’ve also come to learn that the deepest divisions of our time are not really about disagreement, and that the opposite of polarization is not agreement. It is belonging.
Belonging is what lets us disagree and still show up for each other after a fire. It is what lets us vote for different people and still be counted as one community. And here is the most hopeful thing I know: belonging is not something we are born with or without. It is something we build.
We have built it together over these past years. We built belonging during the census. We built it during the pandemic, when trusted neighbors reached one another and helped save lives through our vaccine outreach and education initiative. We are building it now through the Isabella Project, where more than 120 partners are coming together so that working families, and the people who care for our children, can finally find some breathing room. And we have built it in the hardest moments, in the ashes of wildfire or flooding from atmospheric rivers, when neighbors who had lost almost everything still showed up for neighbors who had lost everything.
Belonging, it turns out, is not a nice-to-have. Belonging is infrastructure. It is as real as a road or a bridge or a hospital. And when the crisis comes, and the crisis always comes, the communities that endure are the ones that built belonging before they needed it.
Father Gregory Boyle reminds us that systems change when people change, and people change when they are cherished. This is why coming from a place of love, where we truly see one another, is so essential. Love and belonging are not soft. They are the work.
It is in the spirit of seeing love in action that we are excited to feature our scholarship program this month. Many of you will recall that the VCCF Scholarship Program was built on a simple belief in the power of opening doors. In the beginning, it was a handful of committed donors coming together to award around fifty students with one hundred dollars each at an annual hot dog barbecue. Today, because of you, it has grown into more than $2 million in opportunities for students to pursue their dreams all the way through their technical and higher-education journeys.
I know you will enjoy the message of hope from our Scholarship Director, Kirsti Vomund, and the student stories, which capture the impact that has been built over the last almost 40 years. Sometimes we may forget that each time we give to a cause we care about, we are not simply donating money. We are helping move love into action. With each act of generosity we are telling someone: you do not have to carry it alone.
Because in the end, it really is this simple.
We are all neighbors.
And we all count.
Nothing is more important than how we treat one another. Let us spread as much love into the world as we possibly can. The future of our community, and our shared world, depends on it.
With gratitude,
Vanessa
Vanessa Bechtel, VCCF President & CEO |
