This article is based on an interview conducted by CFLeads with Dan Templin, Executive Director of DeKalb County Community Foundation. Dan has served as Executive Director of the DeKalb County Community Foundation for more than 17 years and is a member of CFLeads’ Board of Directors.
Written by Kyumon Murrell, Director of Community Leadership Initiatives, CFLeads, and Makenna M. Brandt, Program Coordinator, CFLeads
In the early days, the DeKalb County Community Foundation (DCCF) did what most community foundations do: it raised money, managed funds, and wrote checks. Founded in 1993 and operating in a largely rural stretch of Northern Illinois, about halfway between Chicago and Iowa, it was a lean institution with a modest balance sheet, a small staff, and a straightforward mission. It was, in the words of its current Executive Director, Dan Templin, “very much about philanthropic banking.”
What happened next is a story about an organization that allowed itself to be stretched, challenged, and ultimately transformed. Not just in what it does, but in how it understands its own purpose. It is a story about the courage it takes to move from only grantmaking to genuine community leadership, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Seeds of a Different Role
The reshaping of the DeKalb County Community Foundation began when community organizations asked the foundation to step out of its own box. Two United Way chapters in adjacent DeKalb County communities were competing against each other for funding. Community leaders turned to the foundation and asked: Can you bring our boards together? Can you help broker a conversation about merging into one organization?
In another instance, a county mental health board and one of its nonprofit grantees were exploring shared training opportunities. Again, they came to the Community Foundation: Could you convene the agencies? Could you provide some seed funding?
“We ended up being seen as an objective change maker in our community,” Templin notes, “where we could leverage our relationships and resources to bring people together.” These were not grand strategies. They were responses to direct community needs, and glimpses of how the Foundation could be a community convener.
The grantmaking model gives us a certain amount of influence, but also the way we go about doing it gives us the opportunity to build trust, to be seen as effective stewards with good intentions.”
The Partnership That Changed Everything
Around 2003, the Grand Victoria Foundation, a private foundation created from proceeds of a gambling establishment in Elgin, Illinois, launched an initiative called CommunityWorks. Their vision would be a pivotal one for the DeKalb County Community Foundation: partner with community foundations across the state to pursue meaningful impact in the three focus areas of early care and education, workforce development, and land use and conservation.
DeKalb County Community Foundation was selected as one of 18 community foundations in Grand Victoria’s initial cohort. What followed was not just a grant—it was an investment in organizational transformation. Grand Victoria provided annual operating support that allowed DCCF to hire Templin as its first program director in 2005. They funded a multi-phase process: training and orientation, community planning, implementation, and an endowment-building phase that helped permanently embed the work into the foundation’s DNA.
The result of those early years of deep engagement was the CommunityWorks Impact Plan, a document that charted the Foundation’s course, issue area by issue area, and articulated what community leadership could look like in a rural Illinois county.
Of course, not everything went smoothly. Some board members wrestled with the origins of the funding; a casino-derived private foundation raised real questions about values alignment. “The Board at the time had to really grapple with that,” Templin recalls, not once but several times as endowment matches were offered. “We had to acknowledge where it came from. But on another level, the greater good was around what we could do with these dollars to really benefit our community.”
Learning to Be Proactive
One of the most enduring gifts of the CommunityWorks experience was a shared language and mental model for the difference between reactive and intentional community investment. Templin describes this difference in terms that are both vivid and practical.
Responsive grantmaking is like a broadcast fertilizer spreader, a mile wide and an inch deep. Proactive grantmaking is the deep-root spike: you focus your resources into the root system of a specific problem, in a targeted way.
This distinction became a cornerstone of the foundation’s identity. Today, Templin orients DeKalb’s proactive community work around four E’s, each representing a domain where the foundation has made a sustained, strategic commitment: Education, Environment, Economy, and Equity & Belonging.
Within education, DCCF funded a multi-month kindergarten readiness research study and has sustained years of investment in early care. In economic development, the foundation ran a community economic development grant program for seven years and recently funded an evaluation of that work to understand its lasting impact. Within the environment, the foundation continues to support county-wide watershed planning and conservation implementation efforts.
And in equity and belonging, the work has been both the most important and the most stretching. Templin is candid: pursuing this commitment with an all-white staff, in a community that is largely white, raises genuine questions about who is at the table and whose experience shapes the strategy. Unlike economic development, where there is often broad consensus on goals, equity work surfaces deeper tensions about culture and values within the organization itself. For DCCF, this fourth E is not a completed chapter. It is an ongoing reckoning with what it truly means to be a foundation that serves everyone in its community and how to best support upward mobility in various contexts.
Putting the Framework into Practice
What does CFLeads’ Framework for Community Leadership look like when it meets a rural Illinois county? At DeKalb County, the Framework comes to life within the Foundation’s operations.
Values, Culture, and Will
With the announcement of a grant from Compeer Financial’s Fund for Rural America & Giving, designated for rural vitality work, Templin’s instinct was not to design a program and run it themselves. Instead, he asked, who else in this county is best positioned to lead this initiative? The answer was the DeKalb County Economic Development Corporation. The Foundation redirected the grant to a committee anchored by that organization, empowering local expertise to drive the work.
“Our values are very much driven by collaboration and humility,” Templin explains. “Sometimes we’re not the face of things. We position and equip and empower others who are more strategically placed.” It is a choice that minimizes risk and maximizes community ownership, and it is, in its own quiet way, an act of profound institutional confidence.
Relationships
The foundation has learned that who asks the question matters as much as what the question is. When community engagement work required difficult listening or facilitated dialogue, Templin occasionally brought in a consultant, not to abdicate leadership, but because he understood that an outside voice could sometimes generate trust far better than an internal one. “We are influencing the convening at the end of the day,” he notes, “but that doesn’t mean we’re always the spokesperson initially.”
Understanding and Skills
Just over 21 years into his tenure, Templin remains candid about a persistent challenge: he came into the organization with community leadership built into his professional DNA from the start, but some of his staff and Board Members did not. Equipping a team to think in terms of systems, to hold complexity, to see the big picture, to create, sustain, and sometimes shift strategic priorities, is ongoing and demanding work. The kind of work that takes training, reinforcement, patience with turnover, and the humility to meet people where they are.
The Foundation has utilized building internal capacity through orientation to the CFLeads Framework for Community Leadership via Community Leadership Lab and a KPI dashboard designed around it. Even with the progress, Dan does not pretend the work is completed. “I wouldn’t say we’re pros,” he explains,” We’re seasoned. But I wouldn’t claim the very top of the ladder.”
Even if you feel you’ve reached a pro level with something, six months later something might change the trajectory, and you’re back down the ladder. Progress isn’t linear. Everybody’s on a journey, doing the best they can.
Resources
The Grand Victoria Foundation partnership gave DCCF a pool of endowed, flexible dollars to fuel the work. Building on it, the foundation is now working to attract new co-investors to its rural vitality work, using a recent corporate grant as a starting point. It is encouraging committee members to bring local dollars to the table alongside it. Dan is honest that the response has been slow. “Just because we care about something and see how valuable it is,” he reflects, “it doesn’t automatically mean those with the right resources buy it or understand it.” He suspects the strategy needs more time to take shape before donors feel confident enough to invest. For a nine-person foundation with no dedicated development staff, this won’t be overnight. But DCCF has built its community leadership work over decades, not years, and that same long-term strategy guides how it is approaching the work of growing resources to match its aspirations.
For Community Foundations Ready to Take the Next Step
Dan Templin serves on CFLeads’ Board not as someone who has arrived at a destination, but as someone deeply committed to the community leadership journey. When asked what he would tell community foundations just beginning to embrace community leadership work, Templin replied with an answer that was both liberating and clarifying:
The CFLeads Framework for Community Leadership is a roadmap, not a recipe. A lot of people might be tempted to feel like it’s a recipe, that you must check every box and go level by level. That’s not how it’s intended to work. A roadmap shows you various paths to get to your destination. Some are more direct, some are slower, some are more scenic, some are going to have more challenges. And detours happen along the way.
He offers sound advice for community foundations ready to start their own community leadership journey: “Think about which issue areas you’re a novice in and [in] which ones you’re further along. Be honest about where you are. And be patient with the pace of systems change because outcomes take time, and people will get impatient. Your job is to keep them engaged and invested in the long haul.”
DeKalb County Community Foundation’s story is not one of sudden transformation or perfect execution; it is something richer. Their journey showcases a twenty-plus year arc of learning, adapting, stretching, and deepening. It is proof that a small foundation, serving a rural community, with a committed leader and staff, and a willing board, can be a genuine force for lasting change.
DeKalb County Community Foundation did not wait until it had all the answers. They did not wait until their balance sheet was large enough, their staff experienced enough, or their strategy perfectly formed. They leaned into opportunity, grappled honestly with contradictions, and kept showing up for early learners, for rural communities, and for the neighbors whose voices were not yet at the table. Theirs is a story of how, when community foundations embrace their own greatness, everyone is invited to thrive.
