GILROY
– Even if the Gilroy Garlic Festival doesn’t exist some day in
the future – something strictly unforeseen today – the annual
event’s scholarship program will live on.
GILROY – Even if the Gilroy Garlic Festival doesn’t exist some day in the future – something strictly unforeseen today – the annual event’s scholarship program will live on.
Executive Director Dick Nicholls and past presidents of the Gilroy Garlic Festival handed over a check worth $190,000 Wednesday to the Gilroy Foundation. The donation will be added to a $10,000 gift the Garlic Festival made last year, making the endowment Gilroy Foundation’s largest.
“There’s no reason to believe the festival won’t go on forever, but you never know what the future can bring,” Nicholls said. “If there’s some unforeseen situation that makes it impossible to carry out the festival one year or over a number of years, (the Garlic Festival) will continue to give back to the community.”
The $200,000 comes from Garlic Festival reserves that exceeded the amount needed to operate the yearly event, Nicholls said. The Garlic Festival has for years taken a 5 percent yield from the principle to pay for scholarships given to Gilroy High School and Gavilan College students. Typically, two students receive one $5,000 scholarship each.
Scholarships will be given out in the same way in the future, although a different organization now controls the money.
“I think this is a good idea. The foundation will have no problem managing this,” said Jodi Heinzen, a member on both the festival and foundation boards.
The Garlic Festival’s $10,000 donation last year was supposed to be the first of 20 annual payments to the Gilroy Foundation. Those payments were to be part of a long-term plan to build the $200,000 endowment with the foundation, making sure scholarships could be given out in perpetuity regardless of the festival’s fate.
The festival board of directors decided to step up the pace, partly because funds were available, partly because the world is such an unpredictable place.
“I guess with it being the silver anniversary, it kind of brought the issue to light. People got to thinking about how it would be nice to be around another 25 or 50 years, but that there were no guarantees,” Nicholls said. “If there is no (Garlic Festival) event, we don’t exist. But as long as the foundation has money in its accounts, it will always exist.”
The Gilroy Foundation manages donations made for the public good by private individuals and businesses. The foundation channels the earnings from those investments to other local organizations which provide various services to the community.
The Gilroy Foundation endowment, which now totals roughly $850,000, is supervised and managed by Community Foundation Silicon Valley, which has assets in excess of $600 million.
“I feel even better about this decision because the (Gilroy) Foundation is backed up by another foundation,” Nicholls said.
