Announcement from Community Foundation Board of Trustees Chair Kevin Melcher

While his official April 25 start date is still some weeks away, newly named Community Foundation President and CEO Eaton Dunkelberger is already beginning to shape the future vision for the organization.

Below are his remarks, the essence of which he shared with those gathered when meeting with the Board and staff, when he was introduced as the new President and CEO.

I am thrilled to lead the Community Foundation of Northern Nevada!

As background, I started my career in the Marine Corps 25 years ago. There I was fortunate to have incredible mentors in modern management best practices, and I found my voice as an energetic servant-leader, always connecting our work to our mission and vision.

Today, I’m a driven and outgoing person with family and friends deeply rooted in northern Nevada after moving here in 2010.  I have two children in public elementary school and my wife works in a job she thrives in at UNR.  We met at Stanford and are both constant learners. As a family, we stay busy having fun outdoors, reading, and cultivating friendships.

I love this community, and especially am grateful for the size of our community where it is big enough to have meaty challenges to solve, and small enough to make a big difference.  Our kids see me engaged in the community in my work at SNJ, or volunteering in areas like assistant sports coaching, getting involved in veterans’ boards and mentorship, and a place that has been central to our family in the winter, at Sky Tavern Junior Ski Area, where my wife and I currently lead the 6-7 year old ski program.   

I have been at Sierra Nevada Journeys for 10 years and feel very close to the board and staff team I’ve helped create there.  After ten years, we’ve exceeded my wildest ideas about the breadth of impacts we would be making and the assets we would have for long-term sustainability, including a sucessful Capital Campaign we wrapped up in 2020.

One of the key aspects to my enjoyment at SNJ has been that I am a grower of organizations, which is a role I really enjoy and got to employ throughout my tenure there.

Similarly, I believe the Community Foundation is poised for rapid growth within the community, expanding our impact through connecting people who care with causes that matter.  We have an incredible set of assets – clearly our corpus provides us the opportunity to have a very robust team of high quality and passionate professionals at the staff and board level, but we also have a proven track record of convening stakeholders to address seemingly intractable problems within our community.   We are in a great position to accelerate our growth of assets, but more importantly, we are also in a great position to accelerate our growth of community impacts, which I’m excited to lead!

In five years, I hope to be able to see a Community Foundation that we’ve grown together that is: 

• Humming with a robust community endowment
• Tackling hard problems through strategic grant making
• Attracting new and larger fundholders
• Guiding our fundholders to make important community investments, and
• Focusing on areas of the community that have been historically underserved.

We’re going to have an ambitious goal in front of us, and I plan to foster a staff culture of work that highlights 3 important characteristics:

1. High accountability
2. The ability to work independently
3.  And a willingness to be externally facing in our work getting out in the community

Each of these traits is crucial to our success, because we will have big, audacious goals with a relatively small operational budget at the Community Foundation, so we need each team member to be an important value addition to the team, allowing us to run highly distributed operations.

I look forward to leading a team that works closely with the Board and Advisory Board to set and meet big impacts goals for this organization.  I am fortunate to know many of the individuals in this room and am excited to work together as colleagues to grow the awareness, fundraising, and impacts of the Community Foundation.

As I told the search committee, I’m not afraid of big goals, and look forward to setting some exciting targets to reach together. Your historical perspective and connection to the community will be critical to our successes. As I wrap up my work at SNJ and come on board, I am eager to meet with each of you to learn more about your hopes and visions for both my work and the role of the community foundation in our region.  

I have benefitted tremendously from my work with the Community Foundation.  As many of you know, Chris was an early mentor of mine when I moved to Reno and became Executive Director of Sierra Nevada Journeys.  Whether it has been learning from Janet Phillips as the consummate board leader at the Truckee River Fund, or hiking with Jim Pfrommer talking through the process of community collective impact, or receiving funding for key impact measurement projects at Sierra Nevada Journeys, the Community Foundation has made a large impact on me personally.  

The Community Foundation of Northern Nevada plays an important role of “paying it forward” in this region. I am ready and enthusiastic to both give back to this organization and to provide the same servant leadership I received to foster positive change in our community.