This week, community foundations across Northern Virginia, including the Community Foundation for Loudoun and Northern Fauquier Counties, welcomed Amazon to our community in a joint letter. As we prepare for and anticipate the impact Amazon will have across the region and here in Loudoun, we look forward to new opportunities that lie ahead.
Recently, Jeff Bezos, founder, chairman, and CEO of Amazon, and his wife Mackenzie Bezos, donated $97.5 million to 24 nonprofits across the country that are working on family homelessness. The Bezos The Day 1 Families Fund announced in November that it will invest $2.5 million in Northern Virginia Family Service’s efforts to end family homelessness in the region. The grant will support fund NVFS’s work to pursue solutions to family homelessness. Funding from the grant will go toward housing after shelter and providing families with services, skills training and job support needed in transitioning to and remaining in permanent housing.
Community foundations have a long-standing history of working with corporations to create solutions to local needs in the communities they serve. Northern Virginia’s community foundation leaders welcome Amazon our vibrant, diverse community; below you can read our welcome letter.
Dear Amazon,
Welcome to Northern Virginia! As the timeframe for your decision on HQ2 drew closer, those of us who already call this region home began to think about how we’d welcome you to our community. Community foundations have a more than 100-year history as community conveners and conversation brokers who work tirelessly to preserve, enhance and protect the quality of life for our neighbors. This role often places us directly in the middle of our community’s most important decisions, most pressing issues, and most promising opportunities. Many in our community believe that your decision to locate HQ2 in Northern Virginia is the most impactful event to happen in each of these categories in a generation.
Your arrival will bring jobs, critical advancements in the quality of our public transportation, investments in technology education, and opportunities for small businesses that will serve you and the workers you attract – among many other things. Like you, we want our neighborhoods to be diverse and vibrant places to live and work. We want our economic development to be a rising tide that lifts all boats. Companies and community foundations have worked in tandem to address local issues for over a century. It is therefore our deepest hope that in partnership, we can reimagine solutions to workforce development, affordable housing and other social problems, perhaps driven by imaginative technology – dependent solutions not yet seen that we invent together.
Your arrival in Northern Virginia gives us all a chance to create a more regional, collaborative approach to local philanthropy that brings to bear the full capacity and weight of our nonprofit partners, our collective community knowledge, and our shared impulse to help build community through philanthropy. We look forward to working with you, problem solving with you, and advancing our community’s best interests, together.
Sincerely,
Heather Peeler
President & CEO
ACT for Alexandria
Jennifer Owens
President & CEO
Arlington Community Foundation
Amy Owen
President
Community Foundation for Loudoun & Northern Fauquier Counties
Eileen Ellsworth
President & CEO
Community Foundation for Northern Virginia
Bruce McNamer
President & CEO
Greater Washington Community Foundation
[button link=”https://communityfoundationlf.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Community_Foundation_Letter_to_Amazon.pdf”] Read our full letter here[/button]
