Click here or on the headline above to learn more about why participating in the 2010 Census is a great way for every one of us to love our community and make sure we receive billions in federal dollars to benefit all citizens.  more ...

Click here or on the headline to learn more about how the Alabama Symphony Orchestra reaches out to the youngest members of our community and touches more than 100,000 lives year after year,through the gift of music.

Click here or on headline to learn more about Girl Scouts in our local area, the programs that train them as leaders and the taste of success provided in each year's cookie sales.  more ...

Click here or on the headline above to find out more about the Alabama Association of Nonprofits and its new efforts to support the more than 19,000 nonprofits organizations in Alabama.

Click here or on the headline above for more about American Village, celebrating its 10th anniversary as a revoluationary way for visitors of all ages to learn more about civic education and the roots of our democracy.  more ...

Click here or on headline to find out more about the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, known worldwide as more than a museum, but a place where the struggles of the Civil Rights era inspire a new generation to reach for a brighter tomorrow.  more ...

Click here or on headline for the full story of Red Mountain Theatre, its quality musical theatre productions and educational programs for youth, and the Alabama premiere of "Barnstormers.".  more ...

Click here to learn more about the YMCA's new Pathways program, a way for newcomers to join thousands already seeking healthier mind, body and spirit at local branches.  more ...

Click here to read the full story about the national grant and local match that add some $700,000 total for local efforts to fight childhood obesity and make our community a healthier place for all.  more ...

Click here for more about APT, the first statewide educational network in the nation and still an innovative leader in education for all Alabama.

Click on the headline to find out more about what inspired our very first donors, Mervyn and Dorah Sterne, to make possible the first grant ever from the Community Foundation in 1959 and what inspired the most recent grants from more than 350 different kinds of grantmaking funds..

Click on headline to learn more about the 40^th anniversary of UAB, as we celebrate its growth from 15 square blocks to an 86-block complex that has a $3.6 billion economic impact on the state.

Click on headline to find out more about how Hope House, Greater Birmingham Ministries and Shelby Emergency Assistance are responding to increasing needs, and how they partnered with the Community Foundation through the Housing Stability Fund.

Click on headline to learn more about our great Alabama Ballet and December performances of George Balanchine’s Nutcracker, one of the other major productions throughout the year.

Click on headline to find out why more than 200 people showed up to hike on a bright November day at Red Mountain Park, one of three great park projects that make our community special.

Click on headline to find out more about how you can keep Birmingham on the top of the national generosity lists.  more ...

Click on headline to learn what 10,000 children and 350,000 visitors already know about the 20 unique gardens and 10,000 living plants in our Birmingham Botanical Gardens can boast.

Click on headline to learn more about the first woman in Alabama and one of the first 50 in the U.S. to donate $1 million to the national Women Moving Millions Campaign, Jane Stephens Comer, and other philanthropists honored at the National Philanthropy Day luncheon on Nov. 12. 

2,000 parents, grandparents, teachers, administrators, business people and neighborhood leaders raised their voices in 117 separate Community Conversations throughout 2008. These public meetings were part of the first stage of Yes We Can! Birmingham, a grassroots initiative of the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham designed to reach out to people who cared about the future of Birmingham City Schools. The hopes and dreams they expressed formed the basis of a Community Agreement presented to and accepted by the Birmingham Board of Education and now the basis of the mission of the Birmingham Education Foundation. Designed to “support the mission of Birmingham City Schools through cooperative actions in order to ensure children are prepared for success in work and life,” BEF is led by a volunteer board chaired by Fred McCallum, president of AT&T Alabama.

What does it mean to LIVE UNITED?  United Way of Central Alabama believes to LIVE UNITED means that we are all connected and interdependent, the idea that we all win when a child succeeds in school, when families are financially stable and people are healthy.  For the annual United Way campaign, the largest fundraising event in the state, aiming to raise $37.26 million in 2009, LIVE UNITED means bringing people together to meet increasing needs.

The death of Margaret Spain in 1972 represented a new beginning and a great legacy for our community. A bequest from her estate established the Frank E. and Margaret Cameron Spain Fund with a gift of $3 million. Over the years since then, the Spain Fund has made possible grants of more than $27 million to nonprofit organizations across the five counties of Greater Birmingham. No matter the size of your bequest, your legacy gift also has tremendous potential to grow and to give, even as you support the charitable causes you care about forever. As members of the Community Builders Legacy Society know, your legacy gift can give and give and give, far into a future that you cannot predict.

When women move forward, the whole community moves with them. The Women’s Fund of Greater Birmingham proves this every day, especially with the work of its Voices Against Violence Giving Circle to reduce the number of domestic violence assaults in Jefferson County. The goal is to create system change that benefits everyone involved, from the judges, court staff and police officers to the abusers and their victims. In 2006, work began on the Voices Against Violence initiative, a multi-year plan to raise awareness and dollars for strategic grants to address the goal of reducing the number of domestic violence assaults by 25 percent by 2015. In 2009, the Council on Foundations recognized the value of that work with its Critical Impact Award. 

The only thing small about Birmingham Children's Theatre is the age of most of the people in the audience. With a cast and crew of experienced professionals, BCT produces local and touring shows that touch 165,000 youngsters each year across our region.  And there’s certainly nothing small about the enjoyment pre-schoolers and first graders get from a visit to the Wee Folks Theatre or elementary age youngsters find in four Main Stage productions throughout the school year.  Founded in 1947, Birmingham Children’s Theatre is one of the largest and oldest children's theatres in the country and the largest employer of theatre professionals in the Birmingham area.

What does it mean to have a home of your own?  How can you be part of making that happen for someone else? Every year, Habitat for Humanity Greater Birmingham enables 1,500 men, women and children in Jefferson, Shelby and Walker counties to move into a high-quality, affordable home. This result is only possible through the effective use of grants and donations and the enthusiastic participation of volunteers, anyone who wants to pick up a hammer, a paintbrush or a shovel during the construction process. Find out more about how you can be part of making one Montevallo house into a home.

More than 100 young men and women are showing up on college campuses across the United States and Canada this fall, thanks to a boost from caring individuals, families and businesses right here in Greater Birmingham. Scholarship Funds have been created at the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham.by donors who want to remember a beloved daughter, to encourage minority students or to honor an alma mater. But the ultimate impact shows up in the success of these students, as donors experience a personal and high-impact way to use their charitable dollars.  more ...

Alexander City dentist George Hardy finds himself enjoying unexpected fame these days as a cult movie star, thanks to a YouTube-fueled revival of “Troll 2.”  The saga is chronicled in “Best Worst Movie,” the film set to open Sidewalk 2009 on Friday, September 25, in our wonderful Alabama Theatre. More than 10 years after the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival made its debut on the streets of downtown Birmingham, we can love our community by enjoying more than 170 independent films and giving a great Greater Birmingham welcome to more than 14,000 visitors.  more ...

What does arthritis mean to a growing child? For 2-year-old Bailey Warren, it started with a swollen knee, so painful she could not walk on it. For Makenzie Johnson, the symptoms seemed at first to be the normal injuries of an active child – a swollen ankle at age 3, a jammed finger at age 5.

For both children, the diagnosis of a form of juvenile arthritis was slow in coming and hard to accept. Today, thanks to support from the Alabama Juvenile Arthritis Initiative of the Arthritis Foundation and a critical partnership between UAB and Children’s Hospital, both children are receiving treatment through the Alabama Clinic for Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatic Diseases, a clinic that did not exist two years ago.

Sometimes you just can’t see yourselves as others do. That’s why we decided to take a moment to recap some great stories that have brought positive attention to our community from the regional and national perspective. As we think about 50 Ways to Love Our Community, it’s nice to see that writers and editors across the United States appreciate the same things that we do.  Consider the following articles from Smithsonian Magazine, Garden & Gun and the New York Times Travel section in 2009.

It only takes a few minutes to cross the ocean and the ages to Japan and China. And you can do it for free at the recently reopened Asian Art Galleries at our own internationally known Birmingham Museum of Art. Bring the fiercest video game warrior in your family for a look at the armor, helmets, blades and guns that make our Samurai collection the only display of its kind in the Southeast. Or reach out and touch a 250-pound jade boulder from the Kunlun Mountains in northwest China, a stone considered by the ancients to have protective qualities.

What do a beach house, vacant warehouse and a vacant lot have in common? You can use any one of them as a way to support your favorite charity. In just five years, the Charitable Real Estate Foundation has helped to put more than $2.5 million back into our community through donors who gave an apartment complext,  a former antique warehouse, commercial property in Irondale and undeveloped land along Bankhead Lake.

We know we live in a beautiful place. And we know we’ve got a climate that makes it easy to enjoy the outdoors throughout the year. So why don’t we just get out there and go? Is it a question of finding the time or just making the choice between so many great opportunities? Fresh Air Family, nature education organization, offers one way to overcome those obstacles, with easy access to more than 200 activities throughout the year for families, individuals, schools and groups.

Our community is fortunate to have a plan for getting and staying healthy. The strategic document called "Our Community Roadmap to Health" is based on what our community wants for itself and calls on each one of us to participate in making it successful. Through the efforts of the Health Action Partnership, a coalition of some 60 agencies and organizations led by the Jefferson County Department of Health, the Roadmap already is a blueprint for changes that will help us achieve good health for ourselves and for our community.

It’s hip to be civic. That’s the slogan of Catalyst, a civic and social organization that connects more than 1,000 members to opportunities to serve and have fun at the same time. Founded over coffee in 2003, the organization keeps its members informed, involved and entertained through regular e-mails and activities designed to make Birmingham a better place to live -- for everyone.

Pssst! Don’t look now but some bad guys are sneaking up on you.  Mi Mi Osa and Lenny McPrivet are infiltrating the edges of our vital waterways and forests, according to the Freshwater Land Trust, which serves as our local version of the F.B.I.(=Find Bad Invasives).

The Bad Invasive list was created as a way to educate and advocate for the elimination of these two invasive plant species, which threaten the biological health of our community.  Osa and McPrivet, otherwise known as Mimosa and Chinese Privet, made the top of the Bad Invasive list because they have such a major negative biological impact in the landscape.

Find out what you can do to track down these bad guys and defend our native plants and the health of our natural ecosystem.

Do you place a high value on our community’s cultural attractions and institutions? Alabama Gov. Bob Riley does, listing this dynamic part of our economy and our quality of life, along with UAB, as the two greatest assets of metro Birmingham.  more ...

The Birmingham Change Fund is officially listed as a giving circle of the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham. But you might call it the Birmingham Change Family, since the varied members of this group have grown as close as the best kind of family as they have shared their time, talent and treasure to create positive change in greater Birmingham. Today, its 16 members show their love for their community by pooling volunteer hours as well as dollars.

If furniture could talk, what a tale a certain table could tell.  One day, it was the centerpiece of a gracious but empty dining room, part of the leftovers from an estate.  The next day, thanks to the efforts of a local attorney and the nonprofit Community Furniture Bank, the table played host to a mother and four children, victims of a catastrophic house fire that took everything they owned.

Jones Valley Urban Farm is much more than just a source of homegrown, fresh food in an urban setting. From the start, with grants from the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham and others, the organization has focused on educating and reconnecting children to the source of their food. JVUF also shared expertise with others, leading to the expansion of community gardens across Greater Birmingham.

Rebecca Ryan, featured speaker for the Community Foundation's 50th anniversary celebration and a national leader in how communities can attract and maintain the best and brightest of the next generation, shares reflections about her May 11 visit to Birmingham in a "Viewpoint" piece for The Birmingham News.  Here's what she sees today, along with some ideas about how we can make our community a better version of itself in another 50 years.  more ...