1

President and CEO of Inland Northwest Community Foundation:

Mark Hurtubise
Questions for Interview:
1. A big focus of our course is to learn more about social
entrepreneurs and the work they do to improve the lives of
those in the community. How would you define what a social
entrepreneur is?
o $91 million + corporation but non-profit
o They are the community foundation for this region covering 20
counties with 10 in North Idaho and 10 in Eastern Washington
o Deal with a lot of non-profit corporations
o Have about 430 funds which means that organizations or individuals
donate to the community foundation as separate funds and all of
those funds are invested and they generate revenue income which
then is turned into grants to back up different charities
o He has a small as $10,000 all the way up to $10 million
o When you think about social corporation, people typically think
about a product they are selling to meet their revenue goals
o We are lucky because 85% of their assets are endowed which
means that the principal cant be spent so they can already forecast
for next years budget 85% of their revenue because its based on a
monster savings account
o Hybrid term because corporations they work with are socially aware
even though they are classified as for profit but what is important
for this region is the visibility of a lot of charitable organizations that
these corporations are engaged in for example Gonzaga university
and a lot of them are aware that socially aware that they have a
responsibility that they have to be a good neighbour and they also
care about the community in terms of trying to improve peoples
lives
o It makes sense for example, for a bank to want to engage in some
creative charitable work particularly in the education arena because

2
the more people who graduate, the more people will have jobs, the
more people will have savings and checking accounts at the bank so
in a way there is a return plus there is a good feel emotional return
for the employees
o You realize its more about creating, researching and selling
products
o Social entrepreneur is a term that is being more and more adopted
o You look at facebook, for example, Bill Gates and Microsoft, and the
billions of dollars those people donate to the world, so would you
call them social corporations?....not in the political sense but in
terms of sense of being aware and being put in a position that they
can do that
2. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and how
you became interested in this area of work?
o There are over 700 Community Foundations across the US
o There is only one Community Foundation in Eastern Washington so
we are kind of 1:1
o I used to be President of a College where I was 1 of 3,000
o Now Im one of 700
o You dont go to school to grow up to become head of a Community
Foundation
o When you look at other Presidents they are very diverse from
Presidents of Universities, to President of Banks
o There are some characteristics that are very important that people
have developed along the way: Can they strategically plan? Can
they be a great leader? You can be a great leader with vision but if
you turn around and nobody is behind you then you will falter; you
need to cultivate relationships sufficient enough to get other people
going in the same direction as you
o In my 20s I became a lawyer and practiced law; Criminal federal
work on the defense side
o It was a great experience and I did it for a while and I thought, Do I
want to do this my whole life? And said No so I quit
o I went back to school to Santa Clara and got a Masters in History
o I thought to myselfWouldnt it be great to work for an educational
institution or for a Foundation because they are both great vehicles
for social change and improving peoples lives; they are devoted to
and Gonzaga is devoted to improving your life so you are a better
person once you leave there
o I got very lucky and applied to this job 9 years ago and became
the President

3
o Its unlikely that when youre in university you would say to yourself
that you would want to be part or the head of a Community
Foundation
o Often times, you go to school to become something else like a
lawyer and then move into a job like this after you have had some
experience
o Its important for all students like you is to leave a trail of
success of integrity
o One of the problems for young people today is social media
o For example, when we hire people, we check those things like
Facebook
o I know its entertainment but a lot of people dont think through
o What they are doing is creating a visual diary that are employers
are going to be able to view
o What you should be doing is building on strong character and
building on strong success
o Be diverse in your interests
o To work at the Community Foundation, we are education, we are art,
environment, the economy, the Spokane River, so we interact with a
lot of different kinds of disciplines; its like College with all
disciplines shrunk up into a Community Foundation
o You have to have a certain kind of personal idealism; to devote your
attention to improve peoples lives
o Its very rewarding; much more rewarding than any kind of financial
return
o People working at the Foundation have come with many different
kinds of disciplines and all of these people who work here could
probably go out and make more money but they weighed their own
personal goals of making money to pay bills with whats going to
add value to my life; people come into this line of work believing
that that can be very self-fulfilling
o If your month end salary is your driving force in life, it begins to
wear thin after a while
3. Other than the Community Foundation, what other types
of social entrepreneur type work have you been involved in?
o When I left law I went back to school and went into higher education
and hit various positions at different institutions
o I was constantly around theoretical research, volunteerism and
around people who wanted to do something worthwhile with their
life
o If I hadnt done that I probably wouldnt have been invited to come
to work at the Foundation

4
o A higher educational setting is similar to what we deal with here at
the Foundation, we have our scientists, our theoretical researchers
o I think it would be great, especially in high school, to incorporate in
a government course a section that that deals with what we do,
with social corporations and then in college, its important to take
courses like youre taking today because youre dealing with billions
of dollars in North America
o If you took philanthropy out of North America, there would be such a
phenomenal gap that people would starve to death, people wouldnt
have housing, people wouldnt have job training, health care or be
in a situation where they may need help
o When we look at the finance and business partners that we
have and some of our philanthropy, its moving away from
giving a gift and having it end at that gift but rather
attaching to the grant or gift a request from that non-profit
to show us they have accomplished something that is
measured in terms of outcomes in improving peoples lives
and that is changing socially
o A lot of non-profits work independently and a lot of donors work
independently so we have an opportunity in this community that we
are modeling right now of bringing co-funders (co-donors) together
to talk together about larger grants that will effect multiple nonprofits, 100s of peoples lives, and in order to get those dollars, the
non-profits have to show what they are going to do, how they are
going to do it and report back how peoples lives have changed in a
positive way
o There is a different social model and I think this is being borrowed
from the for-profit model because no corporation is going to operate
without paying attention to the bottom line
o The sense of urgency in a for-profit corporation to do well and sell a
product but in a non-profit world or government world there is not
that sense of urgency and a different pace
o As a funder of Community Foundation, our finances, our resources
can help stimulate that urgency to improve peoples lives by
attaching deadlines that would accompany our grant
o This is a new theory that is starting to evolve across the United
States because a lot of donors are growing weary that their grants
arent producing the results that they would like to see
4. What led you to Inland Northwest Community Foundation?
o Had passed deadline but applied anyhow and got the job
o It is a privilege for everyone who works at the Foundation to work
here
o We dont exist but for the kindness and benevolence of people

5
o When you think about it, our assets have been given to us by
people who have worked their entire life to make those assets and
they are giving if over the CF to preserve the benefit of this region;
what an altruistic, noble goal
o There is a moral obligation of making sure that those donors
wishes, many of them who arent here anymore, are fulfilled
o You really have to walk into this environment believing, 1, how lucky
we are and there arent very many of us, but the moral and ethical
responsibility we have to balance a budget, and track everything we
need to try to do some good in the community but not just be
frivolous with our donations
o Think in terms of those donors would they be proud of what we
are doing?
5. Can you tell me about the work that the Foundation does in
the community? For example, what are some of the biggest
charities that the Foundation helps to support and how do they
support them?
o We invest millions of dollars so we have to be responsible
o We have to get the best return on our investments
o Our goal is to try to invest in the community to measurably improve
peoples lives
o We do that through awarding grants and scholarships
o We have different grant programs where non-profits apply for
grants; we have a rigorous process where their applications are
reviewed; many times there are site visits, we have volunteer
committees; we have 150 community volunteers who help us do our
work
o Think of a 91 million dollar corporation being run by 8 people.
o There are a lot of efficiencies that are important here so we are not
frivolous about that
o We have to show the community that we have balanced budgets
o We have programs where donors have funds with us and they
recommend grants that go out into the community
o So its not a reactive grant program; there are donors who
recommend grants from their fund
o There is a discretionary pool of money thats not restricted to any
kind of program that well use to see if we can involve the
community with some initiatives from co-funders
o Eg. Rogers High School had a graduation rate in 2009 of only 50% of
their freshman graduating from high school
o Today its about 82-83%; the school district including Gonzaga
University, Washington State a lot of non-profits, corporations all

o
o

o
o

came together to try to strategize so that was pro-active in the

sense of taking on an initiative
We gave a grant to Gonzaga for example, that was funded by us
and the Gates foundation for Gonzaga to do some best practice
research for how to intervene with those school kids to help them
graduate from high school
They came up with some outstanding examples
So there is a reactive program, you have donors
recommending grants and a competitive scholarship
program all over our 20 counties and we have also agency
funds where non-profits ask us to invest their endowments
on their behalf
We also have charitable remainder trusts; they are trusts
where in a legal way a person needs a life income so we set
up a process where they get involved in charitable work but
also get life income coming back to them
We own a 1,200 acre farm called the Hub Centre which is in
the Valley which is a recreational athletic facility that we
lease and we put a lot of our programs from pre-school all
the way up to the elderly
We had an anonymous donor who asked us if we would be
interested in buying it with the hope that there is enough
money to come back to us; we buy the building
We have a lot of products and we are very flexible so when
a donor comes to us, we take great pride in trying to
accommodate them

6. Are there needs you see in the Spokane community that are not
being met? If so, what kind of charity or organization do you feel
needs to be created to meet that need?
o Tons!!! Look at all the social ills
o Things are being done in a fragmented way in the sense that nonprofits in this region operate independently and in silos
o They are all well intentioned, they have wonderful leadership,
enthusiastic people trying to improve peoples lives; some deal with
maybe 12 people
o Eg Second Harvest is a corporation that serves 15,000 people a
month, free meals, BUT what happens to those people after they
get fed?
o We have a serious crime issue here, we have a drug issue, a mental
health issue,

7
o There are 3,000 K-12 students in Spokane county that are classified
as homeless and that increases by 500 per year what if that gets
to be 10,000??
o Just think about what that is going to do to the social programs and
the increase in crime
o And the other interesting thing is in this region, we used to think of
the homeless person as the guy living under the bridge or with a
cardboard sign asking for a handout
o Well that was 15-20 years ago
o Whats added to that statistic now are women who have children
and the guys have taken off; they wanted to stay home and raise
their kids but now the guy is gone
o What has added to that to and this is a very serious evolution, is
that families that were middle class or lower middle class that ins
2008-09 when we had the housing crash and the market went
down; people had very high mortgages, the guy was working and
the woman was a stay at home mom are now homeless
o They are living out of hotels, doubling up and sleeping on couches
with relatives.that statistic is rising
o They had all of the values like working hard, wanting to get into a
home and who would know the market would just crash and people
with high mortgages lost their home, lost their jobs, they were in
debt and no place to go
o The face of homeless is a topic that CF is very interested in
because people generalize to the guy living under the
bridge or holding a cardboard sign that says I need a beer
and that statistic is actually becoming a minority number in
relationship to .
o So what programs are going to be in place to support those
individuals because the highest number of students who did not
graduate from high school were homeless
o There are self esteem issues, risk issue, bullying issue and you cant
generalize because some of them come from homes where there is
violence, abuse, single parents, drugs, and some of them,
innocently, are in a family where they worked as hard as they could
and it just didnt work out and they are struggling to get by.
o There are more and more families across the US where this is the
case
o When you look at finance, this community rental units are very hard
to come by because people would prefer renting rather than buying
a house
o There are a lot of issues about construction homes in the paper
about Are we building too many rental units? but whats being
picked up slow are homes and whats being picked up rapidly are
rental units

8
o The environment is another issue
o We need more bike paths, walkways, the river going to Port a lane
because of the mining, Spokane River is pollutedI sure wouldnt
eat the fish
o Job training, science technology, STEM, math, we are going to be in
desperate need for people training in engineering, science, math
background because the jobs 10 years from now .what you are
going to school for today, its conceivable that what is required
from you 10 to 15 years from is going to change so dramatically so
how do people like you continue to retool and stay engageddont
think that one job is going to last 40 or 50 years
o Ive lived in 5 different states and this is the longest job I have ever
had (almost 10 years)
o A lot of it stems from the educational formula needed to support
young people to get through the system because everything drops
o Over 70% of the inmates in the Idaho State Penitentiary didnt
graduate from high school
o You can just see statistically that all kinds of issues like health
issues, obesity issues
o You get a kid that graduated from high school and the possibility of
them not going to prison, not going to prison, not having obesity or
being out of shape raises dramatically in a very positive way
o I think whats needed here is a more collaborative approach and
thats what the Foundation is trying to accomplish
o We are not a political party, we are not associated with a formal
religion, so we can provide a neutral venue for people to have a
dialogue, use the resources, because our only agenda is how do we
invest in the community to improve?
7. What are the most frustrating parts of your job?
o The greatest challenge is to encourage non-profits to look
beyond their success by the activities they are involved in
versus the results of their work with respect to improving
peoples lives
o For example, you look at a high school counselorwe desperately
need qualified counselors we are understaffed in high school for
counselors
o Counselors many times report on how many students that they see
and what were the issues
o What would be interesting is if the Superintendents would say to
those counselors, How many of those students that you counseled
did you guide through to complete high school?

9
o So what happens is that non-profits will talk about how many meals
they provided; how many people they served; how many homeless
people came in and slept that night in that homeless shelter?
o So we dont have a network of taking those individuals and
giving them wrap around services to get out of the situation
they are in to improve their lives
o They are going to be parents who will have children one day, or
maybe they have children
o If you turn one kids life around you can turn the whole universe
around to a positive direction
o It could very well be that the next or years from now, the next
President of Gonzaga University is homeless and will complete high
school, go to college and get a Doctorate
o Its a different way of thinking to try to resolve a problem when you
have to somehow connect the organizations together so they are
working collaboratively and not sustain the problem
o We have to think about a lot of what we do are we sustaining these
challenges and problems by the way we interact with people?
o Non profits talk in terms of who they serve, how many they serve,
how many they counseled how many beds they filled, how many
people they fed vs how many people they guided to self-fulfilment
o Its a new paradigm, a new civic model and it just takes an
organization like ours to continue to bring that up and hopefully
encourage people to think that way in a non-threatening way
o If you take a non-profit that serves a need that people have, to
remove that need so that it doesnt exist any longer that means
that person who is CEO of that organization is unemployed so in a
way there is a little friction between
o Its like a psychologist, if everyone was well mentally you wouldnt
need psychologists but psychologists need people who are in need
of help, so in a way its a kind of tension between improving the
world but it will effect other people because it would mean some of
these non-profits would be out of business
o Some organizations if we no longer had abuse for example and
there were no longer women in shelters, that would be a celebration
but some people would lose their jobs so a challenge, for sure
8. What are some of the biggest challenges for The
Community Foundation?
o Being patient
o Weve given about $50 million out to the community in the last 40
years; great stuff, very celebratory a lot of positive things have
happened as a result

10
o I think as an organization; weve just begun our adolescent years
and we need to mature into really seeing the potential influence
that we could have in encouraging people to collaborate cooperate;
linking to the universities; linking to all that research, unleashing all
of the energy of the idealism of the students, of faculty to get them
to help us to determine some of the new modeling that should take
place
o We are the regions savings account; think about having $91 million
dollars that spins off, hypothetically, 4% every year to giving grants
every year
o You give a grant to a place like Sandpoint up North, a small
community; you give that community a grant of $5 or $25 thousand
dollars you could significantly change in a very positive way a small
rural community
o To design a plan that creates a culture here so that anybody who
comes after us will understand what we were wanting to evolve into
and they will continue that
o Its like university, you build on another persons success (Gonzaga
president now built on successes of past president) and you want
that to happen
o So young students will hopefully go out into the world and make a
difference

9. What are some of the biggest accomplishments of the The

Community Foundation?
o Peoples lives have changed
o We have evidence that people have gotten scholarships and have
gone on to become very successful people
o We have testimonials of all parks and pathways, bike paths, we
have funded clinics in rural areas for medical purposes
o We have engaged with the non profits where we do have evidence
that people lives have been helped
o So thats Number 1
o The investments we have made in our non-profits definitely has
proved to be positive in many ways
o Just our asset growth
o In 2006, we were about $49 million in assets
o So just 8 years later we are now over $91 million
o Our first 32 years we gave about $700,000 in grants per year

11
o Since 2006, 8 years later we now average about $3.3 million per
year
o Thats a tribute to the people who put the resources with us
o I dont have a basketball team; I dont have an art gallery or a golf
team so our best strength comes from the professionals in this
community; attorneys, finance people etc who have clients; who
they recommend donate to us to manage their assets to improve
peoples lives
o We have gone from about 290 to 430 funds; 85-90% of these
funds were established by individuals who came to us from
professionals within this community
o The fact that we are becoming more visible, and trusted partner is
very celebratory
o Our assets wouldnt grow but for those professionals suggesting
their clients come to talk to us
o And thats a celebration too, that people want to put their assets
into the community foundation that will be permanently invested to
benefit this community
o So you can think what these people think about this community to
want to keep their assets here to improve peoples lives including
the scholarships they give out
o We have scholarship recipients who go to all different kinds of
universities
o Even you.you may make a lot of money one day and turn around
and think, wouldnt it be cool to have a scholarship named after
myself, your parents, your family and knowing that you are making
a difference in some kids lives
o Just like you have a golf scholarship, I went to school on a basketball
scholarship
o My dad died when I was 18, two weeks before I went away to
college and my wife and I are thinking about a scholarship where I
went to college because a 4 year full ride meant a lot to me and you
dont realize it until youre out of it and realizing that oh my gosh,
and realizing how fortunate that somebody did that for me and why
not can I do that for someone else
o And thats whats happening, the rewarding part is to work with
people who you get close to emotionally because they are so
rewarded by handing over to us something thats going to be there
imperpetively
o And thats what is so great about the profit for public world because
they can partner with us and its very rewarding for these
corporations or John Hemingson, to associate with us and Gonzaga,
because there is a deep spiritual, emotional, personal reward in
giving besides continuously taking

12
o But you have to take when youre your age and then you will be
able to give
10. If you had to summarize the top three lessons you have
learned in the work you do as a social entrepreneur, what
would they be?
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o

o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o

The principle of honesty and integrity is number 1

A handshake has to be a contract
If you violate that youve lost a little bit of your character
In our work, trust and integrity is so high because people are giving
their money and hard work and resources over to us to help to
improve the community
Everybody who I have here has to understand that it is their
privilege to be here and we are only here because of the kindness of
other people so that is very high
I also think that people have to come here and understand the
spiritual reward of helping people
To help somebody and to look into their eyes and relay their
smile and look back to us in the form of appreciation that
has no dollar attached to it
That memory.you can buy something and it will rust or
wear out, and you will throw it away, but the memory of
doing good for somebody stays with you for decades and
that is extremely important and rewarding
The other thing is just the complexity is exciting
You have all of the social issues and all of the civic issues
you can imagine that exist and interact at the CF level and
you have the privilege to have money to effect change
A lot of people are driven, not by idealism, and if fact its rare that
people are driven by idealism
Most people are driven by economics and their behavior will change
based on economics
You can give someone a raise and they will change their behavior
So for non-profits, how do we utilize our money to effect positive
change?
Because we know that by giving a grant to an organization, we can
put into the requirements of that grant certain behavioral changes
of that non-profit that can hopefully benefit
So the complexity of the problem which is endlesswe are always
going to have crime, sick people and homeless people but can we
diminish it to a point where we can look back and say wow look
what weve done to improve the situation

13
o We were talking at the board level, that we have this asset we also
have a moral responsibility to change who we are to be more
effective so we are ramping it up in terms of our political
partnerships, our corporate sponsorships, our non-profit
sponsorships
o We are very fortunate that there is basically nobody who doesnt
want us in their office because we dont come with an agenda
whether it is an elected official, President of Gonzaga or a corporate
CEO because they are interested in terms of whether they want to
collaborate
o We have a lot of grant relationships with Gonzaga and hopefully its
a source of pride for us and a source of pride for Gonzaga knowing
that we can gave them a grant and that we think so highly of them
that they can provide some service within the communitysort of
like a lab for students