Over the past few years, I’ve become very familiar with the Roundhouse Foundation of Sisters, Oregon, population 3,000, and its mother-daughter leaders Kathy Deggendorfer and Erin Borla. Located nearly three hours southeast of Portland, Roundhouse has almost exclusively funded rural and Indigenous communities across Oregon — communities that philanthropy tends to overlook.
The fortune behind the foundation comes from outerwear giant Columbia Sportswear, founded by Kathy’s grandparents Paul and Marie Lamfrom, who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and eventually put down roots in Portland. Their daughter (Kathy’s mother) was Gert “Ma” Boyle, who became the gregarious president of the company. She died in 2019 at 95.
Boyle’s estate changed everything for Roundhouse. By 2024, the foundation held nearly $400 million in assets and distributed close to $16 million that year.
But Roundhouse is only half the story. The Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation, founded in 1998 by Kathy’s sister Sally Bany and her late husband David, has been doing its own quiet work, with a notably broader footprint across Oregon. It’s roughly on the same scale as Roundhouse: In 2024, it held $375 million in assets and gave away around $20.4 million.
The Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation operates with a lean staff and a small, all-family board that includes second-generation family members. Grantmaking spans education, food security, housing and community development, with a generalist approach that reflects a belief in trusting Oregon nonprofits to know what their communities need.
I recently sat down with cofounder and Board Chair Sally Bany, second-generation Trustee Rachael Bany, and foundation President Tyler Hobbs to understand how this other branch of the Columbia Sportswear family approaches giving.
A sportswear fortune sets the stage for philanthropy
Marie Lamfrom arrived in Portland, Oregon, in 1938 and got to work quickly. Having served as a nurse during WWI, she started a Girl Scout troop at Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland and kept it going for some four decades, all the way up until the year before she died. “My grandmother just embraced the new country and the city of Portland, and immediately started volunteering,” Sally Bany said.
Her husband Paul ran a shirt factory in Augsburg, Germany. When the family arrived in Portland, he bought a small company called Rosenfeld Hat Company and renamed it Columbia Hat Company, which in time became Columbia Sportswear. Marie helped her husband in the business. Paul died in the 1960s, and the couple’s son-in-law Neal Boyle, Sally Bany’s father, passed away from a sudden heart attack in 1970. In their wake, Bany’s mother Gert and her brother Tim stepped in to run the company (The 77-year-old Tim is currently president and CEO of Columbia Sportswear).
Sally Bany, born in 1958, was the second of Gert’s three children. In 1979, Gert and Tim approached her about running a new venture: outlet stores, which were taking off in the Northeast. Bany had been studying art, but made the sharp pivot, and for the next several decades, worked at Columbia, served on its board and spent as much time as she could with her grandmother.
“Being able to work side by side with her every day was amazing,” Bany said. “She remembered everybody’s names and it just really was an amazing learning experience for me — how much that meant to people, that somebody cared about everybody.”
Sally and David Bany: getting the foundation off the ground
In 1998, Columbia Sportswear went public, raising roughly $116 million. Today, Columbia is worth some $3 billion. When the company hit the market, Bany and her husband David decided to start a foundation in Marie’s name.
“We wanted to take a portion of that stock, and with my grandma’s spirit, start a foundation to help people like she did, so that her memory would not be forgotten in the community,” Bany said.
The Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation kicked off that same year and started small. A few years later, in 2001, the foundation still held under $630,000 in assets and gave away a modest $116,000 to a half dozen grantees. Sally and David Bany were the sole trustees, meeting once a quarter around the kitchen table. Their early interests tracked closely with Marie’s own experience advocating for children, including funding programs to send Portland Public School kids who otherwise couldn’t afford it to outdoor school.
The foundation also helped create a music school, Youth Music Project, in West Linn, which continues to receive support from the foundation today. Thirteen years later, 975 kids a week come through the doors and 40% attend for free.
A big bequest, and how the foundation scaled up
When Gert Boyle died in 2019, Sally Bany was named executor of the estate. Boyle left half her estate to the Roundhouse Foundation and half to the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation, which was transformative for both.
Previously, Bany, her older daughter Rachael, and a small circle of helpers had been managing the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation themselves and doing site visits. Then Tyler Hobbs joined in October 2020 as the foundation’s first full-time professional hire during a period of post-bequest expansion. Hobbs had been working as a development director at his alma mater Gonzaga University and helped the family establish a scholarship fund to honor David Bany after his 2018 passing. And before all of that, Rachael and Tyler were college roommates at Gonzaga. Hobbs said that while he eagerly stepped in as president, he didn’t fully appreciate the scale he was working with.
“My memory of it is that the ultimate scale, that was soon to be realized, wasn’t entirely clear. For decades, the foundation had really been a dinner table foundation,” Hobbs said. “[But it was also clear] that the spirit of that was to be preserved. How do we make that scalable as much as we can? For Sally, it was always clear that this was about honoring and celebrating her grandmother.”
His first few months were all about getting the foundation up to speed, including building a website, creating a grant portal, designing an application and answering a lot of phone calls. At the beginning, the foundation was actively recruiting nonprofits, he said, but word soon spread. The foundation received roughly 100 proposals in its first year under Hobbs’ watch. Now it receives 800 to 1,000 annually. The staff has grown to 11 people. Hobbs expects that number to hold, mindful that every dollar going to excessive overhead is a dollar not going out the door.
What Hobbs spends more time thinking about now is not who gets funded, but who doesn’t. “We’re now moving into a model where the majority of the nonprofits we engage are also nonprofits we are turning down for funding,” he said. His goal is to make those rejections useful, providing tailored feedback from a real person who can direct them toward other resources.
He describes his role inside the family as facilitator, or as Bany called him, “Switzerland,” working through the ideas that Bany generates to find the ones that fit the moment.
What the foundation is currently supporting in Oregon
Today, the foundation gives across a wide range of areas: education, housing, food security, arts, community development. Every time the question arises in family board meetings about whether the foundation spreads itself too widely, the answer comes back the same: “… we’ve talked about that a lot. Why are we a really broad funder? Is that the right thing for us? And every time we keep coming back to like, yes, this is the right thing for us. This is the lens of Marie Lamfrom that we’re looking through,” Rachael said.
In practice, this means expanding Marie Lamfrom’s own work with the Girl Scouts and funding Girls Beyond Bars, a Girl Scouts of Oregon and Southwest Washington program where incarcerated women work for months to earn the chance to lead a troop.
It also means backing Bridge Meadows, which places older adults and foster children in the same housing community, a program Bany’s younger daughter Annie, passionate about theater and music, championed. Another grantee is North Pole Studio, which gives artists with autism a space to work.
The foundation has also carved out an emergency fund to respond to crises including wildfires, floods, and increasingly, federal funding cuts that have left Oregon nonprofits scrambling. Last year, the board approved an additional $2 million and in November, it approved $3 million more for both 2026 and 2027. Bany said the phone has been ringing off the hook, especially from food banks, organizations serving the Latino community and groups that had relied on small NEA grants that no longer exist. “Those people are not afraid to come forward to us and say, ‘we need help,’” Bany said.
There are also the birthday grants. Every June, the foundation celebrates Marie’s birthday and uses it as an occasion for philanthropy. One year, giving was focused on care packages for nurses and doctors struggling through the pandemic.
Leadership from the next generation
Rachael joined the foundation board in 2018 and also runs the family office four days a week, managing investments and real estate. She never met her great-grandmother, but says stories about her weave in and out of family history and that she was close to her grandmother, Gert. “I’ve always been somebody that really enjoyed my family… I would be in high school, and instead of going to lunch with my friends, I would drive to my grandma’s office and I’d go have lunch with her,” Rachael said.
She draws a direct line between Marie, Gert and her mother Sally, three generations of women who were leaders in business — at a time when that wasn’t as common — and in philanthropy. “She paid attention,” Rachael said. “That was something I saw in my grandma. I spent a lot of time with her, but then also something I see a lot in my mom, with the people around her.”
Rachael juggles foundation and family office work with raising two young children as a single parent. She and Hobbs have had direct conversations about how much she can realistically give to the foundation right now, and she has settled into a role built around oversight and trust rather than day-to-day involvement.
“I hired Tyler because I know that Tyler can communicate, and I know that Tyler can take a feeling or a passion and make it into a reality,” she said. She places a premium on communication, a family value learned from her father David, who would drive them seven hours to a hunting trip and talk all along the way.
A foundation board member since 2020, Annie is stepping back a bit from the foundation right now to focus on her own young child, Rachael said.
Meanwhile, Rachael also keeps close to the Roundhouse side of the family. She and cousin Erin Borla talk nearly every day, not typically about work, but about their families, working alongside their mothers, about their grandmother Gert. “I look up to her so much,” Rachael said of Erin. “Her passion and her determination is incredible. She is just a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of person.”
The board is all family and will likely remain that way for some time. When I asked Sally Bany about eventually stepping down one day, she laughed: “Maybe. When I’m ancient.” She thinks about how to bring her grandchildren into the work someday without making them feel obligated, and hasn’t quite settled on an answer.
Rachael wants her kids involved, if they want to be, when they’re older, but is giving them space to find their own path. “I want them a part of it, if they want to be a part of it. But I can see my kids maybe going and doing something different for a little bit.”
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Lessons in Oregon philanthropy and looking ahead
Hobbs said he has watched Oregon’s philanthropic community move toward more coordination over the last few years, trying to reduce overlap and find the places where a dollar can go further in combination with someone else’s dollar.
“Oregon has a responsibility to try to show up for these nonprofits,” he said, noting that Oregon has much less philanthropic infrastructure than Washington or California, with their tech wealth and other industries. At the same time, he said, “I think we’ve seen that Oregon’s really lucky in that we have some pretty remarkable foundations — both the bigger institutions, but also some of these smaller family entities and smaller family foundations.”
As a window into how the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation reconciles past and present, and where it goes from here, consider these two images. There is a suitcase sitting in the foundation’s office that Paul Lamfrom once carried out of 1930s Germany. Nearby, a wall holds photos pinned by each new employee, images of people who matter to them, layered alongside those already there. “I feel almost like Marie is still tangible to me, just in seeing how she might still live in this family, and certainly in Sally,” Hobbs said.
Bany added: “Sometimes, I hear people say, ‘oh, people who have foundations have the power’ and I just don’t like that. I don’t feel like that’s me. I want to help people. And my family worked really hard, and probably a lot of it was luck and all the historical stuff that went on…. [but] no, I’m a partner with you… I love seeing people with a small idea and making it bigger.”
