The Mount Calvary Foundation Belongs to You

Greetings from your Board of Trustees. From time to time, I remind us all that the Foundation is owned by the entire adult congregation. The Board represents you as we strive to maintain proper stewardship of your assets. We also follow the guidelines established over twenty years ago, that we split our grants among three groups: Local Support of MCLC, Regional Assistance to non-profits in our community, and International Support to projects where our assistance can make a definite difference.

In our last meeting, we voted to provide a $5000 grant toward the synod’s support of Gethsemane Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis. They have recently received a warning that their kitchen must be brought up to code by August. This will require a major overhaul. The kitchen enables the church to provide community meals, a major outreach; and to provide food to the in-house preschool and day-care center. This is a major revenue source for the church. MCLC members are helping plan and make the necessary alterations to the kitchen, which will total about $30,000. Pastor Dave is personally involved in making this a successful venture for the inner city.

On the other side of things, we adopted a proposal from RBC Wealth Management to alter our relationship as we manage our asset base of now over $600,000. “FLUID strategies” uses new technology and data analytics to better stay on top of the vagaries of the market and be more reactive to keeping their actions in line with our investment strategies and tolerance for risk. We expect a slight improvement in the return on our investments, but not a major change in how we manage our growth. David Distad and I are very encouraged to move in this direction. See either one of us if you have questions.

We continue to invite interested “owners” to consider joining the board. The time commitment is quite small, about ten meetings a year that last from 7:30 to 8:30am. We meet the second Tuesday of most months. See any trustee if you are interested.