Community Ownership Program Pillar


Program & Community Investment Strategy

The Lake County Community Foundation’s Community Ownership Pillar is supporting initiatives that are community-centric and shift decision power to the community. LCCF wants to ensure that our investments are influenced by folks who are directly impacted. It is a means of community preservation and building on current community assets. The Community Ownership pillar enables a deepening of the social fabric of the community and enriches a sense of pride and agency over the changes in an area. We believe thriving, diverse and equitable communities are only possible through active participation, particularly by communities commonly excluded from a platform for their voice to have power.

LCCF realizes community must be the driver of change to adequately address the complex challenges our county faces. We welcome creative and innovative requests such as initiatives that lift up art and culture to highlight community strengths, voices of residents, local history or cultural infrastructure. Initiatives that create additional knowledge, resources and enthusiasm for a community issue, or ideas that help community reimagine. Initiatives that connect communities, people, places and economic opportunity by creating new relationships or physical spaces.

We hope to see increased mental health and generational healing, increased support for arts and culture especially in communities of color, and increased community pride in historically disinvested and economically deprived communities.

Project Examples (not limited to):

  • Community storytelling: Sharing and preserving the stories of the people who live in the community
  • Creating community space: The process of designing elements of public infrastructure, or spaces where people can come together and feel safe, welcomed and cared for (support groups, spaces for people to learn and collaborate, spaces for people to create and connect)
  • Community healing: Projects, events, celebrations or programming that generates joy, hope and togetherness
  • Community meetups: Initiatives that bring people together to build relationships
  • Education for community organizing/civil engagement: Anything that increases community’s capacity to be involved in local democracy and community change