The Community Foundation serving Southwest Colorado announces $485,134 in donations in Southwest Colorado on Colorado Gives Day 2020
Dec. 11, 2020 — The Community Foundation serving Southwest Colorado spearheads regional participation in Colorado Gives Day — an easy, online initiative for donors to contribute to nonprofits across Colorado. This year’s Colorado Gives Day, Tuesday December 8, was record-breaking, with $50 million donated to nonprofit organizations statewide and more than $485,000 donated to organizations in the southwest corner of the state.
Local donors are able to choose from 88 organizations listed on the website, swcogives.org, and make safe, secure, online gifts to local organizations directly serving the five-county region of Archuleta, Dolores, La Plata, Montezuma and San Juan counties.
“Each of the last four years that the Community Foundation has led this effort we have seen giving increase substantially,” says Briggen Wrinkle, Executive Director of the Community Foundation serving Southwest Colorado. “This year the jump in donations was astounding — $200,000 more than last year’s giving, a 70 percent increase. Our community clearly understands how hard 2020 has been for so many people, and local donors really stepped up to support nonprofits.”
The Community Foundation’s mission is to power philanthropy, encouraging people to give where they live. This year’s collaborative marketing efforts prompted 2,499 individual donations, a 60 percent increase over last year’s number of donations.
“It will be interesting, as we dig into these numbers, to determine how many individual donors we had this year,” says Tracy Pope, Director of Marketing and Grants for the Foundation. “I think we will find out that we had both new donors and repeat donors who gave more this year. The overall generosity has been incredibly inspiring.”
“In addition to these generous donations, we will also see our portion of the $1 million incentive fund shared with local organizations,” adds Pope. “I expect to see another $20,000 or so awarded to our local organizations, thanks to the statewide sponsors of Colorado Gives Day, Community First Foundation and FirstBank. That means we will see an infusion of approximately a half-million dollars into Southwest Colorado in just one day!”
Online donations may still be made at swcogives.org, as this is a year-round electronic giving platform to benefit local nonprofits.