Congratulations to Jim Pearman for being selected as one of three Volunteer of the Year Award finalists for the Community Leadership Awards sponsored by the Invest in Others Charitable Foundation and InvestmentNews.
Jim, a managing member of Partners in Financial Planning, L.L.C., was nominated by Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation for his service to the organization.
The nationwide award is given to a financial advisor who has been actively serving as a volunteer at a local non-profit organization for at least two years and has made a contribution considered to have a “lasting impact” in his/her community.
As a finalist, Jim was recognized at a dinner Sept. 13 in New York City. The following morning he rang the opening bell at the NASDAQ MarketSite in the heart of Times Square.
Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation’s logo was also displayed in Time Square.
Though the award went to an advisor who founded a Kansas-based organization that helps people with developmental disabilities find employment, Invest in Others made a $5,000 donation to Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation in honor of Jim being a finalist.
Click here to read the Invest in Others’ release.
Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation thanks Jim for his many contributions of time, talent and treasure in support of our mission to make eastern Montgomery County the best it can be.
The nomination
In support of his nomination, Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation (MVCF) wrote the following:
Here is a typical story of Jim Pearman’s service as a board member of Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation …
The growth of our Foundation over the past six years from an all-volunteer organization with few assets to one with $300,000 in endowments and an operating budget of $100,000 had resulted in an increasingly unwieldy book-keeping system. When Jim learned of this, he connected our finances to QuickBooks Online and paid the first year’s subscription cost of $323.
Or this …
Jim Pearman with wife, Brenda, and Elvis (aka Robert Pilkington) at the 2012 ShawsVegas Casino Night.
In 2011 Jim Pearman was already the lead sponsor of our major Casino Night fundraiser. As we began planning for an auction to support the event, Jim was the first to donate a prize: his week’s timeshare at a Las Vegas condo. His gift alone raised $2,000 for our Foundation.
Or this …
In 2011 Jim Pearman created an endowment in memory of his father just a few months after helping endow a fund created by our Foundation in honor of our founder who had just retired from the board.
Or this …
Earlier this year, he recruited another local nonprofit, for which Jim serves as board chairman, to rent office space within our facility, yielding $3,800 in additional yearly revenue for our Foundation. This nonprofit in turn has allowed us to explore new partnership opportunities to better serve our community.
Jim’s service and generosity to Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation have been varied and meaningful, and our organization is so much richer in all respects because of him.
Jim first became involved with our Foundation in 2005 as we were getting organized to undertake a $2.5 million renovation of an abandoned 40,000-square-foot nursing home into a multipurpose community facility.
This was a challenging project on many fronts. In our small rural and underserved community of 6,600 people, one-third live in mobile homes and are considered low-income. More than one-half of our school children qualify for federally funded free or reduced lunches. In addition, our Foundation had no experience raising the kind of money needed to fund the project.
As a certified financial planner with life-long roots in the community, Jim helped shape our fundraising materials, donated $7,500 to the campaign, sponsored various fundraising events, helped rally local government officials to fund part of the project, and connected us with new potential donors.
Today, this facility — The Meadowbrook Center — is fully renovated, with no debt to our Foundation, and features a public library, a YMCA wellness center, a community center, recreation center, history museum, cafe, art gallery, local marketplace, and suite of office space and artist studios.
In November 2010, Jim completed a six-year term on the board of the Virginia Tech Foundation and agreed to join the Board of Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation. Since that time, Jim has personally made significant financial contributions to Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation in the following ways:
- As noted above, in 2011 he helped endow two funds whose value today stands at $90,000. Proceeds from these funds this year alone have provided $2,500 in operational support for our Foundation plus $1,500 that was distributed in grants to local community organizations in support of their work.
- Over the last two years, he has been the lead sponsor of our two major fundraising events (sponsoring a total of $4,350), which have collectively raised more than $54,000 for our Foundation.
- Earlier this year he contributed $8,000 toward our capital campaign to renovate our old fire station into the community’s food pantry and thrift shop. Through his leadership, our capital campaign has raised in just six weeks $114,775 or more than half of our $220,000 goal.
As important as his financial contributions, Jim has been equally generous with his time and talent by providing his expertise on a range of management and governance issues.
- Over the course of 2011 to 2012, Jim has coordinated our strategic planning process and served as board liaison to the consultant who is facilitating this process.
- In 2011, Jim led our Board in negotiating a contract with YMCA at Virginia Tech to operate the wellness facility we had built in the old nursing home. This allowed our facility to be a YMCA with all the health, youth development and active adult programs that are hallmarks of the Y brand.
- In 2011, Jim drafted our Investment Policy and implemented it in partnership with our fund manager.
- In 2011, Jim helped draft the policies that led to the creation of three committees that have become critical to our Foundation’s effectiveness: Fundraising, Distribution and Facilities. In addition, he has served as a charter member of, and board representative to, our Fundraising Committee.
And yet, no job is too small for Jim. For a Ladies Night Out fundraiser we held in 2011, he donned a waiter outfit to serve food and drinks to the 100 women in attendance … and was found at the end of the evening washing dishes in the kitchen.
He has done all this for our Foundation while also serving as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Feeding America-Southwest Virginia; Chairman of the Board of Alta Mons, Inc. (a retreat center located in Shawsville affiliated with the United Methodist Church); Vice President of the Virginia Tech Athletic Fund; and Treasurer of the Roanoke Valley Virginia Tech Hokie Club.
(His recent volunteer service has also included Virginia Tech Foundation’s Board of Directors; Past Chair of the Advisory Council of Virginia Tech’s R. B. Pamplin College of Business; and the Advisory Council of the Department of Accounting and Information Systems.)
Jim Pearman’s work ethic, generosity and commitment to community service are nothing short of inspiring, and matched only by his humility. His willingness to be nominated for this award is due solely to the fact that it benefits Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation.
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With the AEP Foundation grant, MVCF has raised $214,000 to date toward the $230,000 renovation.
All are invited to a “wall-smashing” ceremony this Wednesday at 5 p.m. to launch the renovation of the old Elliston Fire Station into a Food Pantry and Thrift Shop to serve eastern Montgomery County.
