SWIFT takes last bow

Brandon Tauscher, founder of Project Green Build, left, and Gala Miller and Alishia Topper from Columbia Springs Environmental Education Center, accepted grant money from SWIFT on Thursday. Sheila Guenther, right, one of SWIFT’s founders, was on hand to recall the early days and see three final grants awarded to Columbia Springs, the YWCA Clark County and Friends of the Arts. (Steven Lane/The Columbian)

The acronym is so graceful: SWIFT.

What it stands for is so clumsy: Southwest Washington Independent Forward Thrust.

Clumsy or no, SWIFT fulfilled its mission beautifully, according to its sponsors, directors and fans. Many of them turned out at an Officers Row celebration Thursday, as the area’s pioneering charity foundation took a final bow and retired from the philanthropic stage.

“This is a bittersweet evening — but mostly sweet,” said Todd Mitchell, SWIFT’s final president.

That’s because the many nonprofit agencies, service providers, school foundations and other worthy projects that SWIFT was formed to support in 1975 have grown their own wings and flown. The originator of tony dinner auctions has spawned a bevy of admiring imitators; today many local charities hold annual fundraising feasts, auctions and other gala events that combine good food, big crowds, fancy surroundings, glowing speeches and fat checkbooks.

“SWIFT came to compete with the same organizations it was helping to fund,” Mitchell said. But not before doling out approximately $4 million in grants to more than 1,000 beneficiaries, and nurturing a community of nonprofit agencies and social service providers that didn’t exist when it got started.

“SWIFT was here for a purpose. It served that purpose, and our community is a much better place for it,” said past SWIFT president Juliet Laycoe.

Before calling it a day, SWIFT awarded three final grants of $50,000 each to organizations that work with children:

-- Columbia Springs Environmental Education Center will work with Project Green Build and at-risk students in Washington State University’s At Home At School program to build an 700-square-foot, outdoor “green” classroom. A student “green team” will erect the cord-wood structure next summer. When completed, the classroom will be available to the 7,500 students who visit Columbia Springs every year, according to executive director Gala Miller.

-- Friends of the Arts will provide funding for five to seven years of displays of high school student art on archways that will be erected in each block of Vancouver’s Main Street between 5th Street and Mill Plain. Dangling from each archway will be a six-foot circle where the artwork can be displayed for one year. Dean Irvin said the project would prove to be unique not just in the Portland area but throughout the northwest.

-- YWCA Clark County will remodel spaces in its Main Street headquarters and build a desperately needed child care room. Connie Arant of the Y said the building seemed gigantic when the organization arrived in 1997; now, kids in child care are squeezed into very small spaces or hang out in hallways. Some have to be turned away.

SWIFT’s remaining assets will be placed in trust at sister charity The Community Foundation, Mitchell said.

Sheila Guenther, a founder of SWIFT, recalled that in 1975, the city of Vancouver was looking to sell commemorative plates and medallions to celebrate its sesquicentennial. The effort foundered until Allan Weinstein of Vancouver Furniture offered to conduct an auction. He managed to raise the mind-boggling sum of $28,000.

It was such a good time, Guenther said, that the decision was made to form a charitable foundation and continue holding the auction every year.

It was Guenther’s friend Ethel Lehman — later a city councilwoman — who suggested the name SWIFT.

“I’ll throw out the acronym,” Lehman reportedly said. “You fill it in.”

Guenther added: “I think we were a little well-oiled at the time. It’s so awkward!”