Rural Funding is Hard. How the Blank Family Foundation Tackles it.

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For many funders, supporting communities in rural America can seem a daunting task. As experts have noted, one of the biggest challenges for large, national funders is the geographic disconnect between where foundations tend to be located — such as large, metropolitan centers like New York, Los Angeles and the Bay Area — and rural areas. 

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation (AMBFF), which was established in 1995 by the Home Depot cofounder, offers one look into how a larger funder based in a major metro area can support rural places. About half of the foundation’s grantmaking is concentrated either in the Atlanta region, where it’s headquartered, or in Montana, where Arthur Blank owns four ranches. AMBFF began supporting organizations in Montana in 2001 after Blank purchased the Mountain Sky Guest Ranch in Emigrant, a small community in Southern Montana.

“Mr. Blank is always very, very generous and wanting to give back where his businesses are, and he definitely also really likes to engage the people and inspire the people around him,” said Tawnya Rupe Mraz, who serves as senior program director for Montana philanthropy at AMBFF and the foundation’s primary Montana-based Youth Development program officer.

Although not all of AMBFF’s grants in Montana are rural-focused, most of them are. The foundation’s rural work is spread across three of those areas: Youth Development, Mental Health and Well-Being, and Environment. This follows a strategy refresh in 2023 in which the foundation identified five primary areas of giving it would focus on for the next decade. Last year, we took a close look at how Arthur Blank, foundation President Fay Twersky and the family’s younger generations are envisioning the grantmaker’s path forward; we also covered how it’s taking a wide-lens approach to its support for mental health.

In addition to its primary areas of giving, the foundation also oversees a portfolio of grants that align with the interests of Arthur M. Blank. This includes associate-led funds (employees of the Blank Family of Businesses are referred to as associates) like the AMB West Community Fund, which works to enhance the quality of life for Montana residents, focusing especially those in Park and Gallatin counties and in indigenous communities across the state. Since 2002, the AMB West Community Fund has awarded a total of $10.8 million.

“When he first purchased the ranch, he knew he wanted to give back here [in Montana] but the foundation had been established… in Atlanta. He knew his staff in Atlanta was not going to know the needs and opportunities in Montana,” Rupe Mraz said. Blank worked with the staff on the ranch in Montana so that they could set grantmaking priorities there.

Funding economic mobility for Montana’s rural and Indigenous youth

AMBFF funds efforts to help young people prepare for the workforce because, as Rupe Mraz said, Montana employers have expressed concern over youth lacking preparation in life and employability skills, even if they’ve attended college or received postsecondary training. The foundation also works to help young people attain jobs where they have opportunities for growth, training, connections and support.

Last summer, AMBFF awarded a $50,000 grant to the University of Montana’s School of Journalism to support the Montana Media Lab’s Youth Voices programming. For more than six years, the audio storytelling center has offered teens journalism training and workshops, as well as mentorship from the school’s journalists and undergraduate students. Their stories are then broadcast on Montana public radio and professional podcasts. This work has helped high school students to gain important practical skills — researching a story, conducting interviews, writing scripts, editing audio and using recording equipment — and to develop a deeper understanding of media literacy.

Another unique offering is the foundation’s AMB West Hunting Program, which is an example of how a nontraditional philanthropic approach can positively impact rural communities. The program partnered with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to allow for public access to a private ranch to hunt elk. The ranch has staff that provides guides and helps with the hunts. 

“We do a lot of youth hunts,” Rupe Mraz said, adding, “We’ve heard all sorts of different stories — youth who have had mental health challenges, that weren’t really engaged in anything, and then they went out on this hunt and [it] kind of brought this whole level of confidence.” The hunts also allow for families to “stock their freezers for the year with high-quality protein.”

Foundation support for rural mental health and wellbeing

Launched in 2022, the Blank Foundation’s Mental Health & Well-Being priority area has awarded more than $20 million. Beth Brown, managing director of Mental Health and Well-Being, says the foundation has taken a “breadth” approach to that funding.

“What that’s looked like for us [involves] funding direct services supporting young people in both Georgia and Montana, as well as advocacy efforts with organizations like Inseparable and the Carter Center, working on changing access to care,” Brown said. “We’ve also been a supporter of growing this new, evolving field of mental health philanthropy and working with organizations like Mindful Philanthropy and the Goodness Web and Grantmakers in Health.”

Another foundation focus: loneliness and isolation. The geographic isolation that affects many living in rural areas, Brown said, can exacerbate mental health challenges. Social and geographic isolation, as well as difficulties in accessing mental healthcare, are some of the biggest reasons that suicide rates are much higher in rural areas than they are in urban areas.

The foundation aims to reduce the stigma around mental health in rural Montana. For example, AMBFF partnered with the Community Foundation of Montana on a campaign called Beyond the Weather, which works to reduce stigma around mental health among agricultural communities. “We’re in a time where the stigma around talking about mental health is definitely reduced… but it’s still uneven, depending on where you live and populations,” Brown said. “Ranchers are farmers, there’s still a lot more stigma there, so that’s an added challenge.”

AMBFF also focuses on improving access to services. Since the pandemic, online therapy and other telehealth services have become increasingly normalized, which, Brown says, has been a “very positive advancement, especially in places like Montana, where you may be very far from psychiatric help.”

One foundation grantee is the Rural Behavioral Health Institute, which is dedicated to reducing suicide among young people by building a school-based mental health system. According to the institute, suicide is the second-leading cause of death among school-aged youths in the U.S. In Montana, youths and young adults are 2.7 times more likely to die by suicide than youths in the rest of the country.

Another grantee is Hopelab, an Omidyar Group social innovation lab and impact investor that works to support mental health and emotional wellbeing for youths between the ages of 10 and 25. The lab, Brown said, looks at how phones can serve as points of connection where people can form communities and find support, as well as often being the first place to get care through things like mental health apps.

This work also ties in with AMBFF’s work in exploring digital mental health. “We’re very interested in both sides of that relationship with the phone, especially for young people, both thinking about, how do we mitigate the harms of being on social media and what can be the meanness that’s in front of all of us on that platform, but also looking for the hopeful ways that AI can potentially play a role and already is and bringing more access to services,” Brown said.

Across the Mental Health and Well-Being portfolio, AMBFF has awarded $2.9 million to organizations serving Montana.

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• Mental Health Grants
• Environmental Conservation Grants

Backing environmental conservation and land management

AMBFF’s Environment priority area is focused on reducing climate-fueling emissions through its support of clean energy and healthy soils. Since its launch in 2022, the program has awarded more than $23 million in grants.

The foundation’s board has approved two strategies within the Environment program: accelerating the use of clean energy in the Southeast and West, and protecting native grasslands and increasing the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices in Montana. For the latter strategy, AMBFF has awarded $4 million in Montana.

“There’s a very interesting and valuable ecosystem in Montana’s grasslands,” said Blair Beasley, managing director for AMBFF’s Environment program. “Most of the land is held on private ranches, and so we’re working to help those ranchers conserve them and improve their management practices in ways that help to save them money.”

Last September, AMBFF awarded The Nature Conservancy a $1.2 million grant for its Montana Grassland Resilience and Conservation Program. According to the foundation, Montana has the largest percentage of intact grasslands in the Northern Great Plains, and it is imperative to protect it from land use conversion, particularly as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“These grasslands are really powerful at storing carbon in your soil, and so there’s a real benefit of keeping the grass as grass because when it’s developed, it actually releases that carbon into the atmosphere where it can contribute to climate change,” Beasley said.

AMBFF also awarded $3 million last summer to the World Wildlife Fund to support its work in preventing grassland conversion, improving management of grasslands and restoring ecosystem function in the Northern Great Plains.

AMBFF also backs smaller, landowner-led collaboratives like Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, which supports ranchers in North Central Montana; Piikani Lodge Health Institute, an Indigenous-founded and -led organization that promotes the health and wellbeing of Blackfeet people and lands; and the Richard Stewardship Alliance.

“We have found that one of the best messengers for change is a neighbor. So if you see that a neighbor has changed a management practice that is actually benefitting them, then you’re more likely to be interested in exploring whether that’s a good fit for you, as well,” Beasley said.

Landowner-led collaboratives help spread messages to their neighbors about practices that work in their communities and help attract the necessary funding to enact those changes.

“We know about making changes on ranches, it can be really expensive, and so these groups are well suited to help draw down federal funds, for example, and make sure that those funds find their way to ranchers who want to make investments on their property and also to attract philanthropic investments like the Blank Foundation,” Beasley said.

The benefits of staff proximity and a learning mindset

The Blank Foundation’s rural Montana philanthropy gets a leg up from staff proximity. “I’m struck by how fortunate we are to be so proximate in Montana and that we actually have staff there. I know it’s not possible for each foundation,” Brown said.

For funders that cannot have staff in the rural communities they serve, Brown said funders “need to be even more deliberate” and work in collaboration with other funders beyond where the foundation is headquartered to get a sense of what the issues and funding gaps are.

Beasley and Rupe Mraz emphasized the need for a learning mindset. “It’s important that you show up in these communities and you listen and learn,” Rupe Mraz said. “You realize that they have the solutions, and you’re just there to kind of try to figure out what they are, where you might help them [and] connect them to more resources to make their solutions come to fruition.”

Having people on the ground, who live and work in these rural communities, while at the same time having the financial resources and expertise to look at things from a systemic level allows a foundation like AMBFF to make an impact, Rupe Mraz said.   

AMBFF, for example, finances its associate-led funds but has its associates serve on the committees that set the grantmaking priorities, evaluate grant applications, conduct site visits and monitor the grants’ impact. 

“It’s very important for the larger funders who may not have somebody on the ground that they connect into those rural and maybe smaller foundations…They’re very engaged. They have the relationships. They know all the nuances. And it’s just hard for a larger funder,” Rupe Mraz said. 

“You can never have enough staff to have all those built relationships, so utilizing that as a resource, and I just don’t see that enough. There’s some funders that do a phenomenal job with that, and then there are others that aren’t engaging very much with the real local funders. So I think that that’s just so important.”