On Wednesday, April 26th, The Winnipeg Foundation will celebrate its 85th anniversary. The milestone will be marked with a special celebration held at the Manitoba Museum's Alloway Hall.

The event will bring together Foundation donors and volunteers, members of Winnipeg's non-profit sector and community partners, for an opportunity to reflect on the organization's history and look forward to its role in Winnipeg's future. The Honourable Gary Doer, Premier of Manitoba; The Honourable John Harvard, Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba; and Gregg Hanson, Board Chair of The Winnipeg Foundation are all part of the program, which gets underway at 5 pm with a special anniversary cake-cutting.

Canada's first community foundation, The Winnipeg Foundation was established in 1921 by William Forbes Alloway, a prominent local banker. Alloway started the Foundation with a gift of $100,000 and a desire to provide support for the community in which he had prospered.

Since Alloway's original gift, the Foundation has grown to include 1,700 endowment funds, established by donors from all walks of life. Gifts from donors come in every size – from the Foundation's second gift of $15 received in 1924 – to the unprecedented $100 million gift made by the Moffat family in 2003. Last year, those combined endowments generated the $16.2 million in interest that the Foundation allocated as grants to more than 600 local charities.

All gifts made to the Foundation are pooled and permanently invested. The principal is never spent; only the interest generated by these funds is used to make grants in support of community projects.

Today, The Winnipeg Foundation is part of a network of community foundations, currently the fastest-growing vehicle for philanthropy in the country. In Manitoba alone there are 38 community foundations, and 154 are active across Canada with combined assets of $2.3 billion.

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For more information, please contact:
Richard Frost, CEO, The Winnipeg Foundation
Tel. 204.944.9474
www.wpgfdn.org