About Our Foundation

Barberton Community Foundation was established in 1996, when city residents voted to use money from the sale of Barberton Citizens Hospital to create a permanent endowment that would serve the community.

Barberton Community Foundation Board of Directors awarded its first grant three months later: the $32 million construction of a new Barberton High School.

For the next 25 years, repayment of the construction bond limited the monies available for other priorities and projects.

With the bond fully repaid in 2021, your community foundation has entered a new era with a new strategic plan that looks to the future – strengthening the Barberton community today and for generations to come.
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Mission, Vision & Values

To strengthen the Barberton community for current and future generations by providing leadership, fostering collaboration, and creating a legacy of giving to do good. 

We envision an improved quality of life for Barberton residents, now and forever. 

Believe: We are confident in what we’re doing and embrace the idea that our community is worthy of our efforts and energy.

Innovate: Uncommon solutions should be part of our thinking if we are doing a good job defining and addressing the problems we face.

Collaborate: There is more to do than we can do on our own. We must engage and convene others who can breathe life, funding, and energy into the solutions we need.

Elevate: We can pursue expertise and excellence and improvement in all areas of work and use data to drive our choices and actions.

Commit: When the initial excitement of a project has waned for some, our energy makes the work – and the impact – sustainable over time.

History


In 1995, leadership of the publicly owned Barberton Citizens Hospital recognized that changes in the healthcare industry were making it impossible to compete with other larger, privately held hospitals in the region. By the middle of 1996, a plan had been approved to sell the hospital to a private sector group. It operates today as the Barberton Campus of Summa Health System.

But agreements from the 1949 and 1951 between the hospital and the City of Barberton assured that proceeds from any sale of the hospital would go to the city itself.

Public debate about how those proceeds would be used resulted in a ballot initiative to invest the money in a permanent endowment under the stewardship of a new community foundation. The endowment would be invested for growth, with profits from those investments being used for communitywide grantmaking, while the endowment itself would remain in perpetuity.

In November 1996, the plan was overwhelmingly approved in a vote by the citizens of Barberton.

Our First Grant:
A New High School


The first grant made by the Foundation was on February 2, 1997. The Foundation Board voted to fund the $32 million necessary to build an entirely new facility for the Barberton High School. This grant was contingent on the citizens of Barberton approving a $32 million bond issue, which they did. Thanks to this agreement, the Foundation ultimately saved Barberton tax payers $58 million in real estate taxes. In 2021, the Foundation celebrated the last debt payment on Barberton High School.

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