FORT MYERS, Fla. (April 18, 2017) – The Southwest Florida Community Foundation recently added Frederick Moon to its board of trustees.
Born and raised in New York City, Moon graduated from Amherst College and the Harvard Business School. After business school, he served as an assistant treasurer at the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company in New York City. During that time, he engaged in a variety of community-based educational and health activities which led him to a career shift from banking to the nonprofit sector. From 1975 to 1990, he was vice president and treasurer of Pomona College. Pomona College is the founding institution of The Claremont Colleges, a consortium of five independent colleges. As a consequence, administrative work there focused on collaboration and partnership. In that timeframe, he was active with the California accrediting body (WASC) rewriting the financial and governance standards for college and university accreditation. In 1990, he opened the west coast office of Cambridge Associates, the national consulting firm serving the investment and endowment management needs of large nonprofits across the U.S. His consulting clients focused on west coast colleges, universities and foundations.
After leaving Cambridge in the late 1990s, Moon worked as a director of The Surdna Foundation in New York City. He was a director for 20 years, chair for six years and chairman of the investment committee for his full tenure there. He helped transform the foundation from a low-key family foundation to a professionally managed one, noted by field building, collaboration with other national funders and partnering with grantees. In addition to grant-making activities, Surdna had founded two operating nonprofits – a residential treatment center for learning challenged youth and a retirement home – which Moon helped transform to self sustaining, locally managed institutions. The foundation held extensive timber assets in California that Moon managed. Consistent with Surdna’s environmental grant-making program goals, Moon developed sustainable forestry practices and positioned the foundation’s timber assets as a demonstration model for others in the business. As chair of the investment committee, he sought to bridge the gap between the separation that exists between grant making and endowment investing. These efforts helped encourage grant making to be more strategic and business like on one hand while helping locate endowment investment opportunities, which could support the foundation’s overall mission and program goals on the other.
Moon has served on numerous nonprofit boards during his career in southern and northern California and Maine. He continues to be active in many causes, notably environmental sustainability and energy issues, human and civil rights, and finding strategies for local communities to be healthy and sustainable. He has two daughters, each of whom has three sons. In addition to living in Florida, he has a house on the coast of Maine.
The Southwest Florida Community Foundation, founded in 1976, cultivates regional change for the common good through collective leadership, social innovation and philanthropy to address the evolving community needs in Lee, Collier, Charlotte, Hendry and Glades counties. It partners with individuals, families and corporations who have created more than 400 philanthropic funds. Thanks to them, the Foundation invested $5 million in grants and programs to the community last year. With assets of $93 million, it has provided more than $67 million in grants and scholarships to the communities it serves since inception. The Community Foundation is the backbone organization for the regional FutureMakers Coalition and Lee County’s Sustainability Plan.
Currently, the Southwest Florida Community Foundation’s regional headquarters are located off College Parkway in South Fort Myers, with satellite offices located on Sanibel Island, in LaBelle (Hendry County) and downtown Fort Myers. For more information, call 239-274-5900 or visit www.floridacommunity.com.
