Inside the Roundhouse Foundation’s Growth into a Rural Funding Powerhouse
When I first connected with the Roundhouse Foundation in 2022, it was still very much in its growth phase, a family foundation finding its footing in rural Oregon while steadily expanding. In 2019, the foundation had received a bequest from late matriarch Gert Boyle, chair and president of Columbia Sportswear, with funds split between the philanthropies of her two daughters, Kathy Deggendorfer’s Roundhouse Foundation and Sally Bany’s Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation.
The Roundhouse story, in those years, centered on how Deggendorfer and her daughter Erin Borla were practicing rural philanthropy from their hometown of Sisters, Oregon — population 3,000 — with an emphasis on listening, showing up and building trust in places philanthropy often overlooks.
Last year, I briefly caught up with Borla as she was taking that same ethos to the airwaves with the launch of the Funding Rural podcast, a platform for Roundhouse and other funders, nonprofit leaders and community voices to speak candidly about rural philanthropy.
Since that initial conversation in 2022, Roundhouse has grown markedly in size, scope and sophistication, evolving from a small but intentional family foundation into one of the most active rural funders in the Pacific Northwest. In 2019, the foundation distributed roughly $221,000 in grants. By 2024, that figure had risen to about $15.5 million across more than 750 grants to over 600 organizations serving rural, remote and Indigenous communities throughout Oregon. The foundation now holds an asset base of some $400 million and has budgeted $21 million in grants for 2026, a trajectory that reflects both the growth of its endowment and the intensifying needs on the ground.
In a recent conversation, Borla and Deggendorfer discussed how this evolution prompted a series of intentional shifts in staffing, governance, grantmaking strategy, and even how the family understands its role in rural giving. To be clear, Roundhouse remains deeply rooted in rural Oregon, but it is now more firmly plugged into national conversations about trust-based philanthropy, disaster response, mental health and food systems.
Roundhouse’s steady growth into a scaled-up rural funder
Roundhouse’s expansion did not happen overnight, nor did it happen by chance. As Borla explained, the foundation’s growth closely tracked the phased influx of family assets into the foundation, which allowed grantmaking to increase steadily. In the 2019 fiscal year, the foundation reported assets of $25 million. In 2020, that number soared to nearly $142 million and to around $341 million in 2022. Assets were at around $382 million in 2024.
That growth prompted a recalibration not just of grant totals, but of how the foundation operated on a day-to-day basis. What had once been a small, trustee-driven operation required additional staff, deeper specialization, and a greater degree of internal trust as the scope of the work widened. As Roundhouse’s resources expanded, so has its understanding that effective rural philanthropy at scale depends as much on people and relationships as it does on capital.
“As you start to dole out more grants, and we have that opportunity to do smaller grants and be in places, it just takes people,” Borla said.
Roundhouse’s grantmaking team has grown from two to five, and the foundation has added specialized roles that reflect its evolving priorities. Grants Program Director Rebeckah Berry focuses on access to rural healthcare and spends roughly a quarter of her time on the ground in the community. Another recent hire, Grant Program Director Joshua Smith, centers Indigenous programming and Native causes, bringing lived experience from local tribes. Each of these staff have their own budget that they can use to identify opportunities within their focus areas.
For Deggendorfer, the scaling process also required a shift in how authority and decision-making were shared within the foundation, especially as professional staff took on a larger role. “We hired these people. I know them now, and now I need to trust what they’re doing,” she said.
Roundhouse still works across four core focus areas that it considers fundamental to thriving rural communities: arts and culture, environmental stewardship, social services, and education. But over time, rather than forcing grants into tidy categories, it has leaned into what Borla described as “the magic in the middle,” funding work that cuts across silos, reflective of how rural life actually functions.
“When you’re working in such small communities,” Borla said, “it’s hard to find programs that are just educational without a social service component, or just arts and cultural-related without access to environment and those types of things.”
Healthcare, trust, and the reality of rural distance
One of the foundation’s most striking evolutions since our last conversation is its deepening engagement with rural healthcare, an area where small interventions can have outsized effects. The foundation has invested heavily in building relationships with senior centers, emergency medical services and maternal care providers.
It’s also backing organizations grappling with what Borla and Deggendorfer described as “pharmacy deserts.” Over the past several years, more than 100 rural pharmacies have closed across Oregon, forcing residents to travel dozens of miles for basic prescriptions. These closures are driven in part by pharmacy benefit management structures that make it financially impossible for small, rural pharmacies to survive. Adding to the problem, large chains like Rite Aid have also shuttered.
In some communities, Roundhouse’s response has meant funding secure medication lockers where residents can access prescriptions without reliable internet or long drives, connecting with pharmacists virtually for guidance. In others, it has meant starting with something far smaller.
“We start with things like going to senior centers,” Deggendorfer said. “Not just talking about what the big pictures are, but addressing some of those small needs, like foot care clinics.”
Small interventions like these, Deggendorfer and Borla discovered, helped build trust and create entry points for community members to speak about larger issues that they might be dealing with.
Roundhouse leans into disaster response as infrastructure, not just charity
The foundation’s evolution has also been shaped by crisis. After the devastating Oregon wildfires in late summer 2020, the foundation helped co-create the Oregon Disaster Funders Network, a coalition that now includes around 35 philanthropic organizations. Now, through the network, when a disaster strikes, there’s a document that identifies community needs and shows pathways of support.
“There’s a tracker online that funders can participate in and they can identify groups that align with their mission,” Borla said. “And they can fund directly off that tracker so they don’t have to burden the community partner.”
Roundhouse also opened up $5 million in emergency funding in 2025 and later committed $6 million to rural food banks and food pantries across the state in response to the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which introduced significant cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. The foundation also encouraged other funders to join the effort, resulting in several high-dollar commitments from philanthropic partners.
This role, acting as both funder and convener, reflects another shift in Roundhouse’s posture. The foundation increasingly sees itself as a bridge between rural communities, state agencies, federal offices and peer funders.
“I think there’s a fear sometimes from philanthropy that we can’t advocate,” Borla said. “But we can educate.”
That education has taken several forms, like alerting officials to SNAP benefit theft tied to skimming devices at rural grocery stores, or coordinating responses when nonprofits lost reimbursement funding and lacked the cash to legally close programs.
Governance changes and learning to let go
As the foundation professionalized, it also rethought board governance. In early 2024, Roundhouse added its first community trustee, joining a board composed of Borla and her parents, with a second to join in 2026. It also has a 20-member grant advisory committee with rotating terms, an Indigenous advisory committee, a finance committee, and stipended roles tied to specific programs.
For Deggendorfer, who helped found the foundation and once oversaw nearly every decision, this shift required recalibration. “We’ve made a big transition to having more trust in our staff,” she said.
That transition mirrors broader conversations in family philanthropy about trust-based approaches, shared power, and the emotional complexity of letting go as institutions grow. It is one thing to endorse those ideas in theory. It is another to live them, particularly when a foundation is still closely tied to a family’s identity.
A rural foundation with a widening lens
Not all of Roundhouse’s newer work is crisis driven. Some of it is deliberately playful, rooted in the belief that connection and dignity matter just as much as systems change.
The foundation has invested in libraries, particularly “libraries of things” that allow residents to borrow equipment they may only need once in a lifetime. It has supported canning education through partnerships with Oregon State University Extension, drawing unexpectedly large audiences from across the state interested in safe food preservation. And it has even piloted what Borla described as a “Crock Pot project,” — yes Crock Pots — distributing slow cookers alongside food to families living in hotels or fire survivors without access to full kitchens.
“We’re going to buy 100 Crock Pots,” Borla said. “And we’re going to see how they go.”
While Roundhouse remains rooted in Oregon, its leaders are increasingly being pulled into national conversations about rural philanthropy. Borla has spoken at conferences across the country, fielding calls from funders seeking to understand how to engage communities far from urban centers.
“There are not a large number of voices in rural philanthropy,” she said. “So we’re getting those calls.”
That attention has reinforced one of Roundhouse’s core convictions. Rural places do not operate in isolation. They are shaped by global supply chains, federal policy, climate change, data infrastructure and cultural narratives that rarely include rural perspectives.
Roundhouse’s evolution suggests that rural philanthropy, when done well, is not quieter or simpler than its urban counterpart. Instead, it can be more relational, and often more urgent. And as Roundhouse continues to grow, its leaders seem keenly aware that scale only matters if it deepens connection rather than diluting it. Recalling her grandmother’s ethos, Borla said, “It’s better to give with a warm hand than a cold one.”