IN-DEPTH
Growing up on a horse farm near Mount Vernon, Winter Kinne never dreamed she’d be where she is today.
As a senior in high school, Kinne planned to study English and writing in college — but never so close to home, at Drury University, something “my 18-year-old self said I wasn’t going to do,” she said.
She thought she’d teach high school or work in editing or publishing — but somewhere else, not here.
And while Kinne has held several titles at Community Foundation of the Ozarks in the 18 years since she graduated from Drury, back then she never thought she would be leading the Community Foundation of the Ozarks into its next half-century.
“I fell in love with this organization,” Kinne said. “It was not part of my plan to stay in the same place, but it has been the opportunity of a lifetime.”
In November, the CFO’s former vice president of development was named the fourth president and CEO of the organization, which marked its 50th anniversary earlier this year. Kinne will replace Brian Fogle, who will retire in early 2024 after 15 years as CFO’s leader.
Despite concerns about how a nationwide decline in nonprofit donations could affect grants to help solve community problems such as homelessness, poverty and mental health issues, Fogle is optimistic about the organization’s future under Kinne’s direction.
“I’ve had the absolute honor to work with so many colleagues and great board leadership,” Fogle said. “I’m confident that’s going to continue and feel very good about the future of CFO in the hands of the board and with Winter.”
A passion for philanthropy
Kinne has long had her sights set on leading a nonprofit, yet as a young Drury student she wasn’t even aware that careers in the field existed.
Teaching was her first choice, but after job-shadowing a high school English teacher during a practicum, she said she “quickly decided” it wasn’t for her.
Until her senior year, Kinne focused on earning her bachelor’s degree in English and writing, thinking she might pursue a job in editing or publishing.
Then, a positive experience as an intern with the then-St. John’s Foundation for Community Health opened her eyes to the work of nonprofit employees. She remembered thinking, “You can literally help people or the community or whatever it is you’re passionate about as a career,” she said.
During her last semester at Drury, Kinne took a course in nonprofit management taught by now-retired professor Kelley Still Nichols. Meanwhile, she began to look for jobs — and one in particular caught her attention.
“There was actually a little ad in the back of the Springfield Business Journal that the Community Foundation of the Ozarks was looking for a communications coordinator here,” Kinne recalled.
She applied.
In retrospect, the next part of the story would someday seem to have happened “serendipitously,” she said. Then-CFO Executive Vice President Julie Leeth showed up as a guest speaker in her class on nonprofit management.
“And I mustered all the courage I had — wasn’t as much back then as I have now — and went up and introduced myself to her after class,” Kinne said.
Leeth, a Springfield Public Schools principal and teacher before she joined CFO to help get the Ozarks Teacher Corps started, was impressed.
‘A little spark plug’
“I said, ‘This one’s a little spark plug,’” Leeth told then-President and CEO Gary Funk, noting “the fact that (Kinne) had the tenacity and the wherewithal to come up and introduce herself.”
In interviews for the job, Kinne’s spirit stood out more than her size, though. As a former principal, Leeth had hired many a teacher. She had learned to trust her gut and pick up on whether job applicants had “what I call ‘fire in their bellies’” for the work, she said.
“You can almost see it, somebody who has a passion for what they’re applying for, and she had it,” she said of Kinne.
Kinne said she didn’t realize it when she was younger, but what she wanted was “mission-driven work.”
“It turns out — and I didn’t recognize it then, but I do now — that my professional life needs to do something more,” she said. “It would be hard for me to just be in it for the money, if that makes sense.”
Kinne’s newfound passion for nonprofit work didn’t wane after she accepted the communications job at CFO, either — even though her first office was in a kitchen at Hammons Tower, Leeth said.
After two years, Kinne decided to return to Drury to earn her master’s degree in business administration.
“I knew if I wanted to run the Community Foundation or wanted to run another nonprofit, I would need the business acumen and the financial side of training as well to kind of balance both sides of the house,” Kinne said.
Leeth, whom Kinne still considers her mentor, encouraged her to strive for her goal yet said, “Well, you know that’s good, but there’s a lot to learn.
“She was just hungry, almost like a small child is, just for knowledge.”
Many hats, many perspectives
Along with her education, the jobs Kinne went on to hold at CFO allowed her to gain that knowledge.
“There’s nobody in my opinion that has a better grasp of every phase of that organization than Winter Kinne,” said Leeth, who retired from CFO in 2019 yet still talks to Kinne “almost daily.”
Noting that Kinne is now a senior employee, CFO Chief Operating Officer Louise Knauer said the same.
“She has pretty much unequaled knowledge of the internal workings of the organization,” said Knauer, who, like Fogle, plans to retire early next year.
That was when CFO staff sometimes did double-duty: Early on, Kinne said, she even served briefly as building manager and CFO board secretary.
“Our staff was much smaller then, so we all wore a lot of hats,” she said.
In her first full-time job in communications, Kinne learned about the history of CFO, founded in 1973 by former Springfield Mayor Jim Payne, businesswoman Anne Drummond and a group of estate planning attorneys with nowhere to bestow a generous gift intended to benefit the community.
Then, as director of donor services, Kinne heard more stories, some heartbreaking: “The hardest and best fund we set up at the CFO is a memorial fund when somebody passes away,” she said.
“It’s particularly hardest when you are visiting with parents who have lost a child, and they are trying to figure out a way to memorialize that child into the future. And so those stories always stick with me, even more so now that I’m a parent,” said Kinne, who with her husband, Marshall Kinne, has a 7-year-old son, Walker, and a 3-year-old daughter, Kate.
“But it is also our privilege that we have the honor to help people carry a legacy forward.”
Growth at CFO presents opportunities
As Kinne’s roles at CFO have grown over the years, so has the foundation.
In 1993, the Nixa Community Foundation became CFO’s first affiliate; today, there are 54 regional affiliates throughout central and southern Missouri, including CFO offices in Cape Girardeau and West Plains.
When Fogle became president in 2008, just three years after Kinne started working at CFO, it managed $120 million in assets, he said: Last summer, that number reached $430 million.
The foundation could easily be managing assets worth twice that amount within the next 10 years, leaders agreed.
“It’s not crazy to think we could be a billion-dollar community foundation in less than a decade,” said Kinne, who holds the designation of Fellow from the Charitable Estate Planning Institute, directs the Ozarks Charitable Real Estate Foundation and has overseen planned giving through the CFO’s Legacy Society and Professional Advisors Council.
What’s more, the amount given back to communities could surpass $1 billion before then.
“We have granted back out to the community $600 million in the 50-year history,” Kinne said. “We will get a billion dollars back out to the community probably faster than we will get to a billion dollars under management.”
Last summer, CFO celebrated its first half-century at Dickerson Park Zoo, where its first grant paid for the petting zoo. Today, partnering with more than 700 nonprofits, the foundation has been able to do much more to meet community needs.
In 2016, five years after a tornado struck Joplin, killing 161 people and injuring more than 1,000 as it destroyed homes and businesses, CFO made its final payment of a $14 million grant to help victims, Fogle said.
Along with the foundation’s quick response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when CFO decided as early as March 2020 to use “rainy-day funds” to cover family child care and transportation as schools pivoted to remote learning, its response to the Joplin tornado is an accomplishment the organization looks back on with pride.
“I like to think we’ve been very responsive when needs come up,” Fogle said. “One of the things we’re good about is we’re here. We’re part of the community.”
New concerns and challenges
Along with economic development, schools — at the “heartbeat” of rural communities, Kinne said — are often key concerns among CFO rural affiliates, Kinne said. Meanwhile, Springfield’s CFO looks to the annual Community Focus Report for Springfield and Greene County for guidance in appropriating funds.
She’s excited about conversations about “placemaking,” she said, about “really capitalizing on what Springfield and the surrounding communities have to offer and how we can draw people in.”
“We’ll see what part philanthropy can play in that,” Kinne said.
Yet, like Fogle, she is also concerned about “red flags” in the focus report, which is constructed with public input as well as the help of subject-matter leaders.
“Unfortunately, a lot of those red flags have been pretty consistent over the past two decades,” Fogle said. “We have seen an increase since the pandemic in homelessness.”
Another red flag is mental health. Suicide numbers reached an all-time high in 2022, Fogle said, making it the leading cause of death among teens.
These issues and the poverty rate — on the decline, Fogle said, yet still too high — are top community concerns, according to the report.
In addition, Kinne, who’s on the board of Philanthropy Missouri, takes the helm of CFO as a Lily Family School of Philanthropy study shows a historic decline in charitable giving over decades, Fogle reported in a recent video on the foundation’s website.
What’s more, when the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took effect, raising the standard deduction, households had less incentive to report donations to the IRS, he said.
“We went from about 46 million households that were itemizing before that to about 16 million,” Fogle said. “That’s probably the biggest concern.”
Kinne called the downward trend in philanthropy a challenge, yet also pointed out that one of the perks of giving to community foundations could help sustain them, too: Besides tax deductions, foundations offer donors the benefit of “the oversight of knowing that your charitable dollars are going to the place that you want them to go.”
‘No bow ties’ for new CFO leader
Kinne, who turned 41 this month, and Fogle, who recently turned 67, are not only “generationally different” but “different personalities,” Knauer said of her longtime colleagues.
While Kinne and Fogle, who grew up in Aurora, which is about 12 miles from Mount Vernon, have always kidded each other good-naturedly about the Friday Night Lights sports rivalries between their high schools, Kinne agreed with Knauer.
Fogle, a banker for nearly 30 years before he came to CFO, is “more measured” in his responses to others, while she is more direct: “I will just say things, which is something I will work on for the rest of my life,” Kinne said.
And, she said, laughing, “No bow ties,” referring to Fogle’s favorite accessory. “I’ve been asked what my signature thing will be. It won’t be bow ties.”
What the two have in common is more significant than neckwear, anyway.
“Brian and I are very different, but the thing that we share, I believe, is an intense desire to leave the community better than we found it,” Kinne said.
Fogle agreed, saying Kinne has “a deep belief in our mission and what we do every day to try to make our little corner of the world better.”
What her predecessor has taught her, she said, is that “in a world that is increasingly polarized, we are all really more alike than we are different. We want a better life for our kids. We want our community to thrive.”
Kinne said: “If you keep the mission of the organization or the group of people that you’re meeting with central to what you’re talking about, at the end of the day you can hopefully get to some kind of consensus or at bare minimum at least an understanding of people.”
‘A big year in the Kinne household’
At the end of the day Kinne completed her final interview for her new job, her son Walker — who’s “very competitive,” she said — couldn’t wait to greet her.
“He knew I had a big thing that day, and I came home and I got out of the car and he came running out to my car and he said, ‘Mom, did you win?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, buddy.’
“It was pretty cute.”
When Kinne found out that she did “win,” it marked another milestone in their family: As Marshall’s father, Gordon Kinne, retires as CEO of Med-Pay, Kinne’s husband is taking over leadership of the company. And earlier this year, the couple co-chaired Friends of SPS, a citizens’ group that advocated for a successful $220 million bond issue to fund school improvements including safety and security upgrades at all school facilities.
“It’s been a big year in the Kinne household,” Winter Kinne said.
She has a big job, too, she agreed, so the little spare time she has is spent with family and close friends. Cooking — especially wintertime cooking, she said, “no pun intended on my name” — is a much-loved pastime she can still pursue.
These days, soups — pasta e fagioli, roasted cauliflower, white chicken chili — simmer on her stovetop. Comfort foods, Kinne said, for her family and for someone who usually has “about 25 things going on in my brain at one time.”
“And I don’t measure anything,” she said. “You just kind of measure with your heart when you’re making soup.”
It could be a metaphor, she agreed, for the passion she feels for her work — not a feeling she planned to have but one that turned out to be real, nevertheless.
More than two decades after her teenage self told her to get out of town, CFO’s incoming president and CEO said she “can’t imagine doing anything else.”
“I mean, my car doesn’t know how to drive anywhere else,” she said.
