There are funders who happily toot their own horn. And then there are philanthropists like Amy Wyss, a reluctant interview subject who is reticent to bring attention to herself.
Wyss is all about her team and the people in the Mountain West they strive to help. “I came up with a kernel of an idea,” said Wyss about the LOR Foundation, which launched in 2007 but took some years to hit its stride after what she called “a lot” of false starts. “I had to find a group of people who are willing to come up with ways to do this work.”
LOR currently serves seven towns in five states: Cortez and Monte Vista, Colorado; Weiser, Idaho; Questa and Taos, New Mexico; Libby, Montana; and a new site in Buffalo, Wyoming (its work in Lander, Wyoming, wrapped up in June).
The foundation has found its footing with a community officer model that moves modest amounts of money quickly, an approach it kicked off in 2020. Think small-town solutions to everyday challenges. Wyss cofounded LOR with her husband Ed Jaramillo, who also prefers to fly under the radar. Wyss gives where she lives — Wyoming is home — in a rugged region she is passionate about and wants to see thrive (think mountain vistas and backcountry skiing, hiking, biking and wildlife). Wyss’ rural focus stands out in a philanthropic sector that tends to have a rural blind spot: While remote areas are home to 20% of Americans, as little as 3% of philanthropic spending reaches more isolated locales beyond city and suburban limits.
And while LOR funds many projects that might be considered typical rural concerns and loosely fall under the rubric of the environment or conservation — agriculture, food, water, natural disaster preparedness and wildfire prevention — Wyss has a broad focus: Her foundation seeks to improve the quality of life of people in the myriad areas the organization supports, funding the arts, mental health and youth programming.
LOR stands for Liveability, Opportunity and Responsibility. “I had to come up with something,” said Wyss, and you can almost hear the shrug in her voice about the name. “You want people to live well. Opportunity means to engage in the community and have an opportunity to change your world,” she said. “As humans, we have a responsibility to do these things. The responsibility is mine, too: to meet people where they are. That’s an opportunity, too. Where others might see obstacles, we see opportunities.”
Naysayers may question the role of philanthropy and its potential impact on shaping a rural community’s priorities, but Wyss said she is not interested in her foundation helicoptering in with an agenda, and her foundation team say they lead by listening. She wants her community officers, who live in these small towns, to hear directly from residents about what they need and respond in a timely fashion. The average LOR grant in 2025 was just $8,755. But scale is only part of the story: Speed matters, too, said Wyss. Half of funding requests for around $5,000 or less are met within two weeks and 75% of gifts go out within a month, according to the foundation. To date, LOR has moved more than $90 million, according to foundation staff. Assets in 2024 stood at around $325 million.
“When I was very young, and through my 30s and 40s, I saw a lot of people making choices and decisions on behalf of people who didn’t live in those regions, who didn’t work or play or raise their children in those regions, and it just kind of bugged me a little bit for lack of a better term,” said Wyss, who is 50. She recalled thinking: “I know you mean well, but are you doing well? That’s the question.”
Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
Wyss is the only child of Swiss businessman and megadonor Hansjörg Wyss, who has also made his home in Wyoming. The now 90-year-old elder Wyss joined the Giving Pledge in 2013. In 2018, he pledged to donate $1 billion to save the planet. Amy Wyss formerly sat on the board of her father’s main philanthropic vehicle, the Wyss Foundation. Environmental conservation is its primary focus, but it has also given grants across other causes, including left-leaning economic policy advocacy, medical research, education and the arts. (According to a 2023 AP account, Hans Wyss has funneled donations to progressive political causes through other funding platforms.) This year, Forbes put his net worth at just shy of $5 billion.
Hans Wyss made his fortune via his medical device company Synthes (where Amy Wyss once worked), which he sold to Johnson & Johnson for $21.3 billion in 2012. Amy Wyss received a portion of the proceeds from the sale, according to Forbes, which lists her current net worth at around $2 billion. (In 2022, IP dubbed Wyss one of the most powerful heirs in philanthropy; she was also named to Time’s Top 100 Philanthropy List for 2026.)
Affluence aside, Wyss said she grew up working odd jobs in mountain towns; while living, working and raising a family in a rural place, she learned that residents there want to solve their own problems. IP has previously covered LOR’s funding activities, including this year in a report on philanthropic support for local rural media. We’ve also long covered the chronic underfunding of rural regions by philanthropy. There have been some positive developments in this arena — with national intermediaries and associations of rural funders emerging, as Jerry Neal Kenney, then a program officer at the T.L.L Temple Foundation in Texas, outlined in an guest post in August last year.
Still, LOR Executive Director Gary Wilmot noted in an October 2025 IP guest contribution that “rural communities have long been lauded for being able to do more with less. That’s the very nature of these scrappy places. But if necessity is the mother of invention, she’s a single parent in rural America, where built-in redundancies aren’t as common as they are in their urban counterparts. When the lone hospital closes — or daycare, or newspaper, or grocery store — there might not be another within reach.”
These philanthropic gaps have grown more pronounced for years, as investment in rural America has continued to erode, Wilmot said. LOR wants to plug some of these gaps and support rural innovation. No idea is too small or quirky, it seems. LOR has funded traditional charitable causes — efforts to help people with hunger, housing, healthcare, transport and the like. It’s also made grants for lane markers at swimming pools and school choir uniforms.
In June this year, LOR wrapped up six years of giving in Lander, population around 7,385. (The organization looks to support each town for five years; given that COVID was so disruptive, it decided to continue for a sixth year.) The foundation funded around 500 projects and gifted around $3.7 million to the community, according to a LOR staff member. The organization funded local infrastructure (shade structures, safety and equipment upgrades and renovations); tool, toy, mobility and adaptive equipment lending libraries; outdoor murals, a learning resources center for young children, and a sewing class for older children. About that last grant request: A volunteer texted a community officer about it on a Friday. By the following Monday, funds for equipment were approved.
All the ideas come from residents who see simple solutions to community concerns and just need a little funding to get going, noted Wilmot. The foundation has found that if funding is accessible — no formal applications, no deadlines or funding cycles and a quick turn-around time to keep momentum for an innovation going — people make things happen for others in their community.
Winding down in one town, starting up in a new location
Food security remains a pressing concern across the region, especially with changes to eligibility rules for SNAP. Rural folk, who pride themselves on their independence and self-sufficiency, often look for DIY ways to address hunger in their communities.
To that point: One of LOR’s most recent community grants — and the largest in Cortez at just shy of $50,000 — is underway to help feed people. A Cortez bison rancher, who also volunteers at a food pantry where she once served as the manager, proposed starting a small bison herd to supply the food pantry with lean meat. Each bison could yield around 400 pounds of meat — roughly 2,200 servings — which is sufficient to meet the town’s food pantry needs for two to three weeks, according to the foundation. The hope is that this will spur similar efforts, with potential expansion to local pig and goat ranchers, said Nicci Crowley, LOR’s community officer in Cortez.
Crowley has lived in Cortez for 20 years. “Since we are embedded in the community, we know when we go to the grocery store that 15-minute run-in and run-out is not going to happen,” she joked, “because conversations around funding ideas happen in the grocery store, at high school basketball games, waiting in line at the post office.”
One aspect that sets LOR apart, said Crowley, is its ability to work with individuals. A local community funder, Onward! A Legacy Foundation, provides fiscal sponsorship so that individuals aren’t required to start a nonprofit or work within a government department or a school district, she said. “It opens up the opportunity to really make change, when everybody has authority to make change,” said Crowley. “We’ve funded several projects brought forward by youth, which makes me beyond happy.” For example, a fifth grader’s request for goal posts for the soccer field was granted; the foundation kicked in for a storage shed, too.
LOR’s own research has revealed that more people would step forward to initiate projects if they had an example brought to them, said Crowley. To that end, she sees it as her responsibility to bring residents together where LOR grantee recipients (the foundation refers to them as champions) can interact with other community members over social activities to share their projects and innovations — and potentially spark them to follow suit.
As LOR winds down its work in Cortez, Crowley said one area where the foundation has room for growth is in making connections with other funders who can help sustain the programs that LOR helped start. “As we look to leave, I think a lot about, how do we elevate the voice of our rural people and their projects?” she said. “And how do we help attract more grant dollars into our community?”
Meanwhile, in Buffalo, Wyoming, a town of around 4,600 and the eighth community the foundation has served, the foundation began distributing grants in April this year. It has already funded laptops to expand access to Medicare for seniors, a scoreboard for the youth baseball and softball field, and a local festival seeking to enrich the cultural representation of Crow people at the event.
“Break the philanthropic mold”: defending a hyper-local approach
Place-based funders may be plentiful across the philanthrosphere, but Wyss’ model, in which a well-resourced foundation gives at such a granular, hyper-local level, still stands out. Wyss is not alone, though. Other next-gen donors IP has covered recently also take a particularly place-based approach and back small, local concerns. Examples include Peter Buffett and the NoVo Foundation in the small, historic city of Kingston in New York, and the Roundhouse Foundation in rural Oregon.
Wyss, who said she has no desire to be part of the traditional “philanthropy industrial complex,” said she’d like to disprove a commonly held notion or “break the philanthropic mold” that giving small grants like these in large volume can’t make much of a difference to people’s quality of life.
Indeed, she — and the remote towns her foundation supports — beg to disagree. “A lot of the concerns, they’re just human concerns. They’re just happening in this particular community that historically has been overlooked by philanthropy,” said Wyss. “We’ve proven our model is effective and you don’t need a site visit. Your community officer just walks over and goes, ‘Yep, you did exactly what you said you were going to do.’”
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