TELLURIDE – The Telluride Foundation has been selected for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Community Development Initiative of $123,000, which will support Paradox Basin Community Giving Campaign.

The Paradox Basin comprises sections of Dolores, Montezuma, Montrose, Ouray, and San Miguel counties.

The program, with a total budget of $250,000, was announced on by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who emphasized the program’s creation of jobs and support of business development in rural communities.

The funding goes toward helping the foundation to build around Transfer of Wealth strategies, made possible by estates transferring, in the next 50 years, placing wealth in permanent charitable endowments to support local rural communities and charitable organizations in perpetuity.

Grant funding will provide training for communities in the Paradox Basin to use the information provided in a soon-to-be-released Wealth in the Paradox Region of Colorado report, based upon research from the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship highlighting opportunities for community development in the Paradox Basin. The grant funding will also provide training regarding individual giving opportunities, including gifts of real estate and stocks, bequests, gift annuities, charitable remainder trusts, divided estates, and technical assistance for developing a rural philanthropy, community giving campaign in the communities of the Paradox Basin.

The campaigns could enable local governments and/or community organizations to leverage philanthropic dollars and promote community funds/endowments to produce long-term alternative funding sources for rural development projects. “Our communities in southwest Colorado have abundant resources, and include some of the most generous people in the nation, so imagine if only five percent of this wealth were invested back into local communities and charitable organizations and held in permanent endowments for local communities,” said Paul Major, president of the Telluride Foundation. “Such investment would provide long-term community development resources for local communities to shape their own future and stable funding to support the quality of life that makes our corner of Colorado so unique and special.”

Initial results from the Wealth in the Paradox Region of Colorado Report indicate that the Paradox region will face a significant TOW opportunity beginning as early as 2020, and that over the next 10 years, an estimated $1.13 billion will be available to transfer between generations in Paradox region households.  Furthermore, the report estimates that if just 5 percent of the 10-year TOW opportunity were to be captured by local nonprofit and community organizations, for the betterment of the Paradox region communities, those organizations would realize almost $56.7 million. For more information on the Telluride Foundation visit www.telluridefoundation.org.