Q&A with Marshall County Community Foundation’s Linda Yoder
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
The Marshall County Community Foundation (MCCF) awarded 392 scholarships in the 2023-2024 school year, totaling almost $500,000. With more than 400 different funds, MCCF supports projects focusing on the arts, education, health and human services, recreation, building quality of life and the environment.
Founded in 1991, the Foundation’s assets are currently valued at over $39 million. The nonprofit has invested more than $25 million in Marshall County and in the lives of its residents over the past 33 years.
Inside INdiana Business spoke with Executive Director Linda Yoder, who also leads United Way of Marshall County, about issues and projects the organization focused on in 2024, the impact so far, and focus areas for 2025.
This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What are some of the foundation’s biggest achievements for 2024?
It’s been an interesting year, for sure. Like many community foundations in Indiana, we’ve been involved in a lot of the Gift VIII grant opportunities through the Lilly Endowment. We are in the process of raising $750,000 in match funding. At least 60% of that will be used to increase our assets for unrestricted funds and those that we use to support grant applications and those new and emerging needs in the county. We used part of it as a one-to-one match to catalyze a Career Innovation Center. That project broke ground late this summer and we were one of the partners in the financing structure for that. We formed a subsidiary through the Community Foundation to help facilitate that. We used a portion of the Gift VIII match funding to raise an additional $250,000. With that one-to-one match, we are also supporting the One Marshall County Regional Planning Team.
The Regional Planning Team action started forming in 2018 when we applied for a Stellar Designation for Marshall County under the Crossroads name. We achieved the designation in 2019 and recognized that by working together, we have so much more opportunity than when we’re trying to do things on our own. We are very active with the South Bend-Elkhart Regional Partnership, all of the Community Foundation directors in Marshall, St. Joe and Elkhart counties serve on the Regional Partnership board. The One Marshall County Regional Planning Team just reorganized this year and we now have five pillars that we focus on. We’re using another portion of the grant funding through the Lilly Endowment to help each of those five committees, two of those five committees in particular, with some support so that they can organize, do some strategic planning and work more effectively together. We did that with the education committee when we had the Gift VII grant and that’s how we were able to position the Lifelong Learning Network as lead organization on the education pillar, and then they spearheaded the Marshall County Career Innovation Center.
Was there a particular issue MCCF focused on this year?
With all the work we’ve been doing over the years with our community partners, we’ve recognized how affordable housing and child care are big issues for Marshall County. Never more so than now, with all the business expansion that’s going to take place in the region. We worked with United Way on a housing gap analysis and we were able to identify that we are short about 1,300 housing units right now in Marshall County. It used to be that people would live here because it was less expensive and drive to maybe Elkhart, South Bend or Warsaw for better paying jobs, now we’re seeing the opposite. It’s so hard to find affordable housing in Marshall County that a lot of times they’re living in other counties and now commuting into Marshall County for work.
One of the other things that really struck us as we worked through the data is that we’ve got a lot of folks that are aging in place, about a third of our population. We have another third, aged 30 to 50, who are typically first-time homebuyers, but because of cost of construction and inability to qualify for financing, they are now choosing to rent and that’s putting pressure on rental units. We have another third, 30 and under, a good share of them are choosing to stay here, so again, putting more pressure on rental units.
The housing gap analysis was an eye opener. I went into this assuming that the whole goal here was to help people be able to afford to buy a home, but that’s just not the picture for us right now. So with the housing study both at the local and regional level, our main focus was to get the data, find out where people were at, what they were experiencing, then start to form that Housing and Infrastructure Committee through the regional planning team that could then carry on both the short term goals that we have identified and then some longer term strategies as well.
On the United Way side of things, we know that there’s about 40% of our population that are asset limited, income constrained, and employed. A lot of our folks are paying more than 30% of their income for housing if they can find it. Affordable childcare is about 7% of your income, a lot of our families are doing double digits as a percentage of their income for child care. One survey showed one household, paying as much as 22% of their income for child care. So all of those things, the lack of housing, the rising costs for food and utilities has made it a tough season for a lot of our families.
Can you speak more about the housing study?
Yes, that started in February. We received a grant from the Indiana Health Department through United Way. We hired Michael Fortunato of Creative Insight Community Development, and he’s been with us at least once a month since February. We have work groups of about 40 people, looking at everything from policy, transportation, wage issues etc. We were looking at Prosperity Indiana’s reports, and the State Housing wage is $22.07 per hour. Our area median income is around $17 an hour, so affordable housing at 30% would be about $660 a month. You can’t find that in Marshall County.
In February, we were hearing from people that said they couldn’t find full-time work. They could get 10 hours here and 10 hours there, but that’s not enough for a household to thrive. As we got further into the work and into the conversations, we found that’s more of a trend than we would have expected. We’re hearing from some of our partners in adjacent counties that the trend now is to keep folks working with limited hours, rather than going on unemployment, because it’s so hard to get people hired and that’s a way to keep them on the payroll and keep them engaged with a company, but it certainly makes it tough for a family to to make things work.
There’s a good share of folks that can’t relate to some of that, so it’s been an opportunity for us to dive into some of those misconceptions about what the current climate is. We see the lines at the food pantry. We expected that during COVID, we expected that when there was so much disruption in the workplace, but we expected that by now, things would have started to turn around. Our local food pantries are still reporting increases from the prior year, and they were high last year. One of the pantries just told me their highest month ever, was in July of this year. Still tough times, but we’re hopeful.
We went to the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority’s Housing Institute a couple years ago, so we are working hard to find property to put an integrated housing project on. But that’s just one component. In rural Indiana, our homelessness, our housing insecurity, sometimes looks different. We’ve got two hotels in town that are basically serving as homeless shelters right now. We had a nursing home that had deteriorated so badly that it had to be closed down for safety reasons, and so we had 20 people displaced overnight. But that’s the kind of thing, the policies that we’re looking at. How do we fix what’s already here, but then what do we do to prevent those kinds of situations from happening in the future? So that policy team is really an important component of this.
Yoder speaks about the housing issues unearthed by a housing gap analysis done this year.
How closely does the foundation work with local government?
Every city and town and the county is represented on the One Marshall County Regional Planning Team. We’re kind of run by election cycles, so we look at the regional planning team as the group that kind of carries things forward from year to year, no matter what’s happening in a political cycle. We want that group to be looking at long term vision, and putting programs in place that may not produce results tomorrow, but are going to make a difference for the community over time. It is important that we all work together on it, we can’t do it by ourselves.
We’ve also applied for a community leadership grant. We’ll know by the end of the year whether we’ve been approved for that, but we apply both at the local and regional level for housing support. At the local level, we want to create a Community Development Commission and then set up a revolving loan fund to support catalyzing housing projects. It can be in partnership with private funders, but really we have local units of government in mind as well to help them with the projects they may have geared around housing.
At the regional level, if that application is successful, that would help establish land trusts and housing trusts, that would give us even more tools to work with. There’s all sorts of growth happening and we know what our current situation is, we want to be planning for that expansion. Another big component to the housing work that we’re doing is looking at how we can revitalize those vacant buildings and put them back in our housing stock. So we’re going to need all the tools.
It looks like housing is going to be a big focus for 2025.
We hope so. The grant from the Lilly Endowment is highly competitive, so there’s no guarantee, but we felt pretty confident about the quality of our proposal going in. We’ve got a really great team of folks, both at the local and regional level, putting a lot of good thought and bringing in the partnerships that would be required to make both of those work. So we feel really good about the proposal, but regardless, housing is going to be a big issue. If we don’t address it, it doesn’t get better.
How did donor support in 2024 compare to previous years?
Yeah, that’s interesting. We had one of the busiest months that I can recall in October. We had quite a few people contacting us to set up new funds or to support different projects. We have about 400 funds at the foundation, and about half of those are scholarships now. So we distribute about $500,000 in scholarship awards every year. This two-to-one match is also prompting a lot of conversation. We’ve got a lot of interest going right now, so I think it’s going to be a good year for us.
Looking back on the year, what were some of the most productive partnerships?
That’s a hard one because I have so much respect for all of the partners that we’re working with. We reorganized the Regional Planning Team, but we had a great group of folks that did the Stellar Designation application and worked on the projects over the last four to five years. Now, the reorganization has really brought in new faces, new team members, and a new energy. I think 2018 was a pivotal point for Marshall County. I see the county working together in a much different way than we did before. It’s going to take all of us to tackle some of these projects. And I think one of the things that I really appreciate about the work that we’re doing as well is the connection that we have with the region. That is as strong as I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve been in this area for a long time. I was in Elkhart County for a while, and over here for the last 13-14 years.
That’s what drove the Stellar Designation, the first Regional Cities, READI 1.0 and now READI 2.0. One of the community foundation directors in northeast Indiana attended a community event we had in 2011 and she said, “Our goal is to be competitive on a global stage. If we’re going to do that at 10 counties in partnership, we’re still just a dot on the map.” That was a pretty powerful message. So the Regional Partnership has been phenomenal. I just truly enjoy getting to know and work with folks in Elkhart and Saint Joseph County on some of the same issues. We can learn so much from them. They are so respectful and so engaged in seeing our rural communities thrive. Those artificial boundaries we put up sometimes don’t mean anything when it comes to where we work and live and play.
What is one message that you would like to share with the Marshall County community as we go into 2025 and how can they contribute to the work?
As daunting as the challenges might seem, the housing issues, affordable childcare, there’s hope. The better we work together, the better opportunity we have to make a difference and help our communities thrive.
Sometimes people know exactly how they want to support, and other times, they just come in and want to learn more about what’s going on. They can contact us anytime, by phone, by email, by letter.