CEO is stepping down to care for elderly father
Smith, in nearly four years, has helped increase giving by over $3 million a year
Bill Smith is stepping down as president and CEO of the Santa Fe Community Foundation to care for his elderly father.
“Santa Fe and this community are in my blood, but I’ve got to figure out how to tend to my family now. I need to step away while the foundation will continue to be an agent for change,” Smith said. “While I’ve been the frontman, all of our successes have been team successes.”
The foundation manages grants, donations and endowment funds supporting nonprofits in Northern New Mexico.
Smith, who grew up in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, said since he arrived in
Santa Fe in September 2016, the foundation has increased its support for local nonprofits from around $6.6 million in grants in 2015 to over $10 million in 2019. In total, Smith said the foundation has around $100 million in assets.
Nonprofit leaders said the Santa Fe Community Foundation, which has around 15 employees, helps connect them to broader bases of donors as well
as other nonprofits with overlapping missions.
“Bringing funding to nonprofits, that’s the raw architecture of what the community foundation does,” said Roger Montoya, co-founder and director of Moving Arts Española, which provides affordable arts education as well as free nutritional and academic support for youth in Rio Arriba County.
“But the meat on the bones of Bill’s particular style is his willingness to understand that our organizations are responding to dynamic situations. As we saw during the current crisis, the foundation provided some direct support and networking without a whole lot of red tape.”
Since the outbreak began in New Mexico in mid-March, the Santa Fe Community Foundation has raised and managed both a roughly $3 million statewide COVID-19 emergency relief fund and a roughly $1.3 million local emergency relief fund to support nonprofits and small businesses.
Sherry Hooper, executive director of The Food Depot, said the food bank has more than doubled the amount of food it distributes each month during the pandemic from around half a million pounds to over 1 million. Hooper credits the Santa Fe Community Foundation for raising awareness to potential donors, providing donors with a means to support specific causes and providing annual grants directly for operating funds instead of specific programs.
“Grants for operating funds are a true gift. Oftentimes grants are tailored to really specific programs, but the community foundation understands how it’s difficult to raise funds just to keep the lights on,” Hooper said. “Bill reached out at the beginning of the pandemic. He immediately started fundraising and hasn’t stopped.”
Smith, 50, said he is not sure about the next step in his career after his contract ends in late August. Christa Coggins, vice president for community philanthropy, will serve as acting president and CEO once he leaves.
Local leaders say the infrastructure between funding and nonprofits that he helped grow in Santa Fe will benefit the community for years to come.
“In my time as mayor, I have come to see that city government is a very small piece of a larger network of service providers that are essential to our collective well-being,” Mayor Alan Webber said. “The volunteer and nonprofit community in Santa Fe makes a massive amount of difference, and a lot of that is coordinated through the work of the community foundation.”