Why the Roundhouse Foundation Is Taking to the Airwaves to Tell the Story of Rural Philanthropy
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Members of one of the many collaboratives hosted by High Desert Partnership (HDP) in Harney County, Oregon on a contractor tour in the field. funding rural podcast guest brenda Smith is HDP’s executive director.
I last caught up with the Roundhouse Foundation in 2022 as part of our ongoing series on family foundations with the National Center for Family Philanthropy. Based in Sisters, Oregon, and with a funding focus on all of rural Oregon, Roundhouse stands out among local rural funders for its financial heft.
The family behind Roundhouse draws their wealth from the mighty Columbia Sportswear, a clothing brand synonymous for many with the great outdoors. Late matriarch Gertrude “Gert” Boyle steered the company after the passing of her husband, bringing it a new vision and energy.
In 2002, her daughter Kathy Deggendorfer launched Roundhouse which today is steered by Deggendorfer and granddaughter Erin Borla. The foundation experienced huge growth in its asset base when it received a bequest after Gert Boyle’s death in 2019. At the end of fiscal year 2022, the foundation held some $340 million in assets and gave away around $13.6 million. Grantmaking focuses on four areas that are fundamental to thriving rural communities: arts and culture, environmental stewardship, social services and education. Historically, the foundation focused on Central Oregon, but more recently, has expanded to focus on all of rural Oregon — including its nine federally recognized tribes.
But the Roundhouse Foundation also has its eye on rural America at large — specifically, the nationwide lack of philanthropic funding for rural communities.
According to FSG, in 2021, only 7% of philanthropic dollars, nationally, went toward rural America. Roundhouse wants to change that number, not just through its own grantmaking, but by catalyzing others to give. Toward that end, the foundation launched its Funding Rural podcast earlier this year to encourage more national funders to support rural communities. Initial episodes have featured Borla interviewing social entrepreneur Kali Thorne Ladd and Zavier ‘Zavi’ Borja, the son of a Mexican immigrant who grew up in Central Oregon.
Funders like Roundhouse as well as the Kendeda Fund, which also used a podcast to tell its spend-out story, offer good examples of how media and storytelling can help demystify the philanthropic process and give grantmakers new ways to get their messages across. Roundhouse has also been quite keen on sharing its grant partner stories from the ground. I recently caught up with Borla to find out more about why Roundhouse launched Funding Rural, some powerful moments so far on the podcast, and her hopes for the podcast going forward.
Stepping up to the mic
Calling in from a Society of Environmental Journalists conference when we spoke, Borla said that philanthropy-serving organizations consistently tell her she is often the only rural funder they talk to. “The country is large. And a lot of it is rural,” Borla said. “How are we not talking to people who are working the land, growing the food… when we are talking about trying to change those things?”
So Borla got to thinking. Her original plan was to write a series of blogs, channeling her days of writing for a local paper. But Roundhouse already had some experience with the podcast form — a few years back, it had funded a couple of podcasts highlighting female ranchers working on conservation. Borla called one of the podcast producers, who offered to lend her services. The two met at Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture, a 260-acre working ranch that Roundhouse purchased and retooled to support creative placemaking and galvanize the local arts community.
Soon, they started bringing in guests and recording episodes, including with linguistic anthropologist Elizabeth Marino, the podcast’s first guest in March. “[We work with her a lot] on bridging divides through values-based language,” Borla said. “Making sure that even though we think we’re saying the same thing, we might be having a very different conversation based on the language we use.” For example, if she goes into a rural community, she might not explicitly use the word “climate change,” but instead talk about legacy-building and the legacy rural families who are living on the land.
Borla said the inaugural episode landed “really, really well.” She’s also interviewed Dr. Erik Brodt, an Ojibwe native who runs the Northwest Native American Center of Excellence at Oregon Health & Science University, a long-running Roundhouse Foundation grantee. In 2023, Roundhouse gave OHSU a $350,000 grant to support the center and its Tribal Health Scholars, a paid externship program that supports Indigenous high school students interested in healthcare.
“He and I instantly connected when we started funding their program a couple of years ago… We talk a lot about scale in philanthropy. How do you scale rural? And Erik’s first program had three kids. It’s grown over the past five years to 100 students,” Borla said. “It’s really making that impact.”
The power of podcasting
Another part of this story involves the National Center for Family Philanthropy. In fall of 2022, Borla was selected as an NCFP fellow, a “program designed to accelerate the learning and development of family philanthropy leaders.” Through the fellowships, the leaders work on blogs and interviews, participate in speaking engagements and content development for NCFP programs and conferences, and serve on NCFP program and planning committees. Her 2022-2024 fellow cohort also includes Dimple Abichandani of the Solidaire Network and Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, as well as Dilnaz Waraich of the Waraich Family Fund.
While Borla was thrilled to join NCFP’s program, she was stumped on what her project would be. Eventually, that project would be Funding Rural, whose first season will have 17 episodes and run through the end of June. Borla said she has really enjoyed getting to know the five fellows, including Waraich, a Muslim American who is doing work around inspired generosity. “Each of the fellows are working on projects that seem really disparate, but then, when you put us all in the room… we’re all elevating the voices that haven’t been heard. But it’s not because they haven’t been speaking. It’s because people aren’t listening,” she said.
Another NCFP Fellow, “CC” Gardner Gleser, board member of Andrus Family Fund and Charlotte Martin Foundation, was also on Funding Rural earlier in April in an episode titled “The Love of People.” Gleser talked with Borla about her experiences as a Black woman working in philanthropy after George Floyd's murder, and her work in reparations.
The Funding Rural podcast reflects one of the many paths funders can take to communicate about what they’re doing and amplify the voices of grantees and partners in new ways, using new techniques. Earlier this year, my colleague Wendy Paris wrote about the increasing number of foundations that prioritize external communications to amplify their message and their mission. These days, in the world of booming social media, communications can include everything from podcasts and blogs to videos and quick-hit reels that go viral on Instagram.
As another example, the Kendeda Fund revamped its entire website in the final months before its planned spend-down and launched a nine-episode podcast called Stories from the Kendeda Fund, with its grantee partners and philanthropy colleagues, as a venue for the foundation to speak candidly about the lessons it learned over 30 years of work.
The latest from Roundhouse and looking ahead
I also checked in with Borla about what’s new at Roundhouse, in addition to Funding Rural. She said the foundation remains strongly focused on its four core focus areas and aims to make bigger changes on a larger scale. It’s also trying to do more responsive grantmaking on the ground, including in workforce development, which intersects with other areas. Roundhouse has also been doing a lot of rural healthcare work of late, including on access to pharmaceuticals in a landscape where pharmacies are shutting their doors. The foundation has even hired a dedicated staff member to help with this work.
Roundhouse is also looking at community resilience and disaster relief; authentic storytelling and journalism; and gun violence prevention, including firearm-related suicide. Borla cited a chilling stat that while 63% of gun deaths are from suicide, that number is 29% higher in rural communities.
Then there’s Funding Rural and Roundhouse Foundation’s own attempts to speak more broadly about how philanthropy can better serve rural communities and spark change. Borla’s biggest hope for the podcast is that the stories really resonate with people and reveal our shared community. “I hope people feel those and are like, ‘Oh, I see myself in that person with whom I thought I had nothing in common.’ How do we see the humanity in each other?”
