In congressional testimony, Jeff Yost, president and CEO of the Nebraska Community Foundation, described the progress that's been made in establishing a new philanthropic tool for local development in many of the state's small communities:

"The Nebraska Community Foundation is a community development institution that uses philanthropy as a tool; we are not a charity. We are a decentralized system of 200 affiliated funds located in 71 of Nebraska’s 93 counties. I get many requests from people across the nation who want to learn about the innovative nature of our work. Actually, what we are doing is overlaying a framework—one that has been used in countless urban neighborhoods—in our rural environment. It’s a bottoms-up approach that builds on community strengths by identifying local assets rather than focusing on deficiencies."

"Today 88 community-based funds have raised $38 million in endowed assets and planned gifts, most of it in the past five years. Over 2,000 local residents are leading these affiliated funds. Last year NCF and its affiliated funds received over 8,000 gifts. Forty-nine of these funds already have over $100,000 in endowed assets and planned gifts.

"Capitalizing community endowments, however, is just a tool for achieving our ultimate goal, which is building communities where young people will choose to live, work and raise their families. Building endowments creates local funding streams to leverage the kind of community investments required to attract young families back to their rural roots."

We noticed NCF's innovation and teamed up with the organization in 2008 to design their future "operating system" based on their emerging model for philanthropy. NCF was working at the intersection of community philanthropy and community development, blending the two in a new way. At this intersection, the most interesting innovation is what we call the "distributed community development fund." The design of these funds is intended to decentralize to the community level the ownership of philanthropic assets and the use of the assets to empower strategic community action. Essentially in community development philanthropy, the primary role of having a philanthropic fund in a community is not to accumulate financial capital, but to develop and organize social capital around making and implementing community-change strategies. To achieve this requires community engagement and empowerment to build community "self-drive," which simply cannot be achieved through the traditional donor-driven model of community philanthropy.