VCCF End of Year Letter 2022
Happy holidays and a happy new year from the VCCF team!
Dear Ventura County Community Foundation Family,
We have witnessed such generosity throughout our region this past year and it fills our hearts with gratitude. We are in awe of your compassion and commitment to our community and cannot thank you enough for all you are doing to create lasting impact in our shared world.
We recall the first grant made in 2022, which helped a local nonprofit purchase essential household items for women, children, and family pets fleeing domestic violence situations and needing a safe place to stay while permanent housing is secured.
This year, you have helped support those receiving care at Mary Health of the Sick Convalescent and Nursing Hospital, and you’ve awarded scholarships to hundreds of local students pursuing their dreams of higher education and career training.
Together, you’ve sponsored the wishes of children undergoing cancer treatment through grants made to Make-A-Wish Tri-Counties, and you’ve helped cover the costs of training at the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation. You’ve provided critical funding for pancreatic cancer research and have helped local wildfire victims finally secure permanent housing after experiencing devastation in the Thomas, Hill, and Woolsey wildfires.
Because of you, middle schoolers in Oxnard are attending science camp for the first time and a local high school is getting a new library. You have afforded swimming lessons to low-income children and have sponsored dozens of arts and cultural experiences throughout our ten-city region. Together, you’ve underwritten the costs associated with local wildfire risk reduction efforts and have helped protect monarch butterflies from becoming extinct through a meaningful grant made to Girl Scouts of California’s Central Coast…the list goes on and on!
Collectively, you have granted over $20 million this year and your generosity continues, with your most recent grant signed this morning going to help the Boys & Girls Club of Camarillo’s capital expansion, a vital community program that serves up to 500 children per day.
Through it all, you continue to ask what else is needed and what more can be done. You fill us with hope and make our world brighter.
From the bottom of our hearts,
Sean Leonard, Chair of the VCCF Board of Directors & Vanessa Bechtel, VCCF President & CEO