Five Questions With: J. Christopher Philips

J. Christopher Philips has been both founder and president of the Community 2000 Education Foundation.
J. Christopher Philips has been both founder and president of the Community 2000 Education Foundation.

Since 2000, J. Christopher Philips has been both founder and president of the Community 2000 Education Foundation. The foundation provides need-based scholarship support to Charlestown, Hopkinton and Richmond college students as well as providing educational project grants to teachers in all levels of the Chariho Regional school district. He also serves on the boards of the Ocean Community YMCA and the Weekapaug Golf Club. Here he describes the focus and goals of the organization.

PBN: Why did you found the Community 2000 Education Foundation?
PHILIPS:
In late 1999, there was an article in the New London Day of Connecticut, saying that “folks were not giving back to their communities in these good economic times.” That was a sufficient catalyst to get four or five of us planning and initiating an education foundation that would be an all-volunteer organization, a multi-community organization, and would give both scholarships and educational project grants in the Chariho Regional School District, serving the towns of Charlestown, Hopkinton and Richmond, while simultaneously building scholarship and project endowments.
We gave our first two $1,000 scholarships in June of 2000. By 2003, we had the first of two educational project endowments underway (Chariho Community Innovative Projects) designed primarily to fund innovative educational ideas brought to us by teachers and administrators from all segments of the district.
Since that time, we started Chariho Community Strategic Projects (2008), which help provide support for the basics – reading, writing, math, science, and computer and financial literacy. These projects also provide teacher professional development with the goal of helping teachers be the very best educators that they are capable of being. The research is quite clear – if you want to help struggling students, put them with champion teachers!
We have also developed partnerships with the Rotary Club of Chariho and the Westerly College Club. These are independent scholarship organizations with their own scholarship endowments having slight variations in criteria for support. What ties all three organizations together is that each organization provides scholarship support for Chariho kids.

PBN: What is your greatest success to date?
PHILIPS:
Over our 17 years, we have slowly evolved into six different endowments. Our greatest success has been our ability to give significant numbers of scholarships and educational project grants annually and simultaneously build these endowments.

PBN: How are you building these endowments?
PHILIPS:
Our endowments have been built by a combination of individual contributions, a few grants and an annual golf tourney, always the Saturday after Labor Day, that raises about $50,000 a year. We are conservatively invested in the stock market, so a very significant part of our endowment growth over the last 17 years has come from stock market appreciation.

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PBN: How many students have received scholarships to date and how many do you hope to help in the future?
PHILIPS:
In our 17 years we have helped close to 100 students. We give seven or eight new scholarships annually to graduating high school seniors, and we continue to support a like number of sophomores, juniors and seniors.
When we started we wanted to provide support for our youth throughout their undergraduate education, and we have stuck with that guiding principle. There are also a few majors, like physical therapy, pharmacy and engineering that are five- or six-year programs, and we will provide an extra year or two of support in these cases. So, in a given year, we will have somewhere between 32 and 34 scholarship winners in our scholarship pipeline.
We have been gradually increasing the size of our scholarships, and by 2019, our 20th year, we hope to be giving out 35 different $2,000 scholarships.
We also give Career Development Awards to graduating high school seniors. These are one-time, $1,000 awards that go to approximately 10 winners each year who have done a great job with their electronic portfolio and various other activities in researching and making a career choice. The Career Development Endowment is the newest of our six endowments.

PBN: What are your long-term goals for the nonprofit?
PHILIPS:
As of year’s end in 2015, the cumulative value of the four Community 2000 endowments was about $1.1 million dollars. If you add in the partnerships with the Westerly College Club and Rotary Club of Chariho, we have more than $2 million dollars in six endowments helping to provide scholarships and educational project grants to local kids.
We have always loved the dual focus of scholarship support for future community leaders and immediate impact on the educational process via our project grants. Each year, there are worthy scholarship and educational project applicants that we are unable to support with our limited funds. We hope to continue our steady growth, and some day we expect to have multiple million-dollar endowments helping the local educational process. That’s still a long way to go, but a very nice stretch goal.
Community 2000 also receives roughly 400 contributions annually. Someday, we hope to have 2,000 annual contributors.

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