Welcome to the Iowa West Foundation. The purpose of this website is to share ideas as we work together to transform our community. Through this blog I’ll share my thoughts and ideas and invite your feedback. Please check back frequently. Your thoughts are important to me, and to creating the community we all envision.
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It’s never a good idea to declare victory prematurely, but as we head into a new stage of COVID-19 – the vaccination and recovery phase – let’s take a minute to thank those who helped our community pull through the overwhelming challenges of 2020. Last March, the Iowa West Foundation announced we would commit $1 […]
On November 8, I celebrated 60 days on the job as President and CEO of the Iowa West Foundation. It has been a busy two months! In addition to getting to know the staff and board, I’ve met with partner organizations, grant recipients, community leaders, elected officials, and business owners. In spite of the immediate […]
“Welcome home.” I have been hearing those words a lot lately, and every time I hear them it warms my heart. Coming home to Council Bluffs was not a matter of convenience or luck. It was a longstanding goal. When I graduated from A.L. and headed off to the University of Iowa, I didn’t expect […]
Iowa West Foundation Earns National Transparency Designation An ivory tower. These are the words people used when referring to the Iowa West Foundation in a survey conducted by an outside vendor nearly a decade ago. The phrase references a metaphorical place where people are cut off from the rest of the world. Looking back, I […]
It’s been one month since the COVID-19 crisis began. While sometimes it seems like the world we once knew was a lifetime ago, on a positive note it’s truly inspiring to see how our community has come together. Still, so much changed for the Iowa West Foundation in just the past 30 days. First, we […]
PACE showcases what IWF can make possible More than eight years ago in my first few months as the President and CEO of Iowa West Foundation – I started to hear the same story repeated over and over: the arts were in trouble in Council Bluffs and Pottawattamie County. Providers were operating on shoestring budgets, […]
A Leadership Note Blog Post by Pete Tulipana In January of this year we welcomed five new members to the Iowa West Foundation Advisory Committees. There are three committees total, each one with expertise in one of our focus areas: Education, Healthy Families and Placemaking. In an effort to uphold our standards for transparency, we […]
To all of us at the Iowa West Foundation, it is important that the community understand our perspective on how the investments of the Iowa West Foundation are dramatically transforming our community. We want to invite the community to examine our efforts based on facts. In the past three editorials I have talked about the […]
To all of us at the Iowa West Foundation it is important for the community understand how the investments of the Foundation are instrumental in transforming our community. We want you to examine our efforts and our impact on facts. In the past two editorials I have discussed the $237 million dollars that has been […]
The response that I have received from the first guest editorial I wrote Partnership with City of Council Bluffs is the Linchpin of Transformation and published in The Nonpareil on Oct. 23, has been gratifying and enlightening. The most common response I have heard has been “I had no idea.” Most people had no idea […]
