Montecito Community Foundation: The Village’s Benevolent Secret Cabal

You’re driving south on the 101, headed down to the celebrated City of Angles (or whatever it’s called) when you suddenly get a hankering for what your grandpa used to call “a sody pop”. Happily, a left-lane exit looms just there – the deceptively nondescript Exit 94B – and you ease over and hop off the freeway. There is a traffic light at the exit’s terminus, and you are given to understand that turning right will take you to a gorgeous oceanfront drive possessed of the towering palms and heartbreakingly beautiful views that typify the splendor that is the Golden State’s proffered promise to starry-eyed dreamers the world over. But you really want that sody pop and turn left.

Up ahead you negotiate the meddlesome roundabout, yet another prank gift from “The Olde World”, and take one of its bewildering exits called, ominously, Hot Springs Road. To your dawning amazement you are now driving through a forested wonderland.

“What. The hell. Is this?” you ask the windshield. Often the unannounced spirit of a place can be discerned in its catalog of street names, but this enchanted village boasts both the whimsical Butterfly Lane and a thing called Golf Road. Traveler, you have stumbled upon a marvelous and complex Shangri-La. Welcome to Montecito.

“There are so many gems in Montecito, it’s crazy,” says Ruth Green, President of the Montecito Community Foundation (MCF). Alixe Mattingly of MCF’s Project Committee  concurs.

“I just think of the Corner Green,” Mattingly says. ”We have pictures of what it looked like when it was a gas station. Now it’s my favorite place.”

A dense woodland idyll whose deciduous neighborhoods wind happily through a fragrant coastal forest, Montecito is rife with picturesque public spaces, lovingly maintained walking trails, and a welcoming citizenry with arms extended. Montecito is indeed a community like no other. How does the place keep its mojo year after year after year? The answer takes us back to 1966, and today’s happy-go-lucky stewards of a hometown that is second to none.

Rubber Soul. Gemini 9. MCF.

1966! The Beatles’ album Rubber Soul reinvented pop music and studio recording, Astronaut Gene Cernan nearly fainted in outer space, and the Montecito Community Foundation launched its evergreen mission to keep Montecito non-pareil. Since ‘66, the MCF’s projects map to our community’s ongoing story. A reliable, all-hands funding mechanism for civic village projects, the Montecito Community Foundation has brokered funding for efforts large and small, from Casa de Herrero to the Triangle Restoration Project at the corner of Hot Springs and Olive Mill roads.

  “The Montecito Community Foundation keeps a very low profile,” Mattingly understates. “But our projects are highly visible; they’re right there before our very eyes, every day.” To her point, the Montecito Community Foundation, when its name drifts into the public arena at all, is often confused with another heartfelt civic org whose mission is completely different.

“People don’t always know who we are, or what exactly we do,” says MCF President Green. “Often they’ll say ‘– oh yes, the Montecito Association!’ To which I’ll reply ‘well… not exactly.” Green parses the parenthetical distinction between the two.  “MCF – a 501 (c)(3) tax-exempt corporation – can and does take in tax deductible gifts for the Montecito Association’s projects. The Montecito Association is a 501(c) (4),” Green says, smiling. “And they do ALL the work.” 

It’s a credit to MCF’s anti-showboating posture that they are – historically and at this moment – the unsung fiduciary engine behind so many of the features that burnish Montecito’s utter uniqueness as a community. 

“The Montecito Community Foundation’s core mission is community enhancement – to better the community in this place we’re all privileged to call home,” Green says. “That’s really what the foundation’s business is about and why we all, as volunteer board members, contribute our time and effort to this foundation.”

Heart-Powered Community Vessel

What are some examples of MCF at work in our community? 

“One is capital improvements or physical improvements,” Green says, “as evidenced by the outpouring of support we received for the Triangle Restoration Project, with over 300 donations toward that. Our partners on that project – The Garden Club of SB and Casa Dorinda – did the real work on the ground, it must be said. Another standout project was the purchase of an old gas station that is now the Corner Green, a peaceful park for all to enjoy. Other examples include important support to the YMCA, upgrading our 26 bus stops, improvements to the Library, and the construction and maintenance of hundreds of our town’s unique rural road signs. We partner and make grants to local non-profits who are improving our way of life, like the Bucket Brigade for safe walking paths, the Montecito Trails Foundation, and the Garden Club of Santa Barbara – raising money from the community to help them fund things that are important and beneficial to Montecito families.”

 And there are also the community events –” Green continues without taking a breath. “Those community events are so important to the board. We sponsor the wonderful 4th of July parade, for example, and the Beautification Day, in part.”

In another corner of Zoom’s busy screen Alixe is nodding and grinning to Ruth’s soliloquy. “The mission remains the same since 1966; to preserve the unique character, beauty and safety of our community, and to help with projects that require funding not available through the County.” 

These are not mere volunteers doggedly seeing to civic duty. Like the rest of MCF’s board (montecitofoundation.org), Alixe and Ruth are busy volunteer Montecitans in love with, and dedicated to, our nutty paradisical whistle-stop. 

 And how does the MCF funding mechanism work? Mattingly will take this one. 

“One analogy is that we’re sort of the bank account for community improvements and key events that bring us together. You can donate to the Montecito Community Foundation and your donation is going to benefit Montecito’s beauty and safety and preservation. One classic old example; long ago, the Steedman-Bass family owned Casa del Herrero and wanted to bequest that property to the community. That process was going to take a long time,” Mattingly explains. “So they came to the Montecito Community Foundation to say, ‘could you be the repository for this as the process moves forward?’” The Montecito Community Foundation’s status as a charitable organization means all donations are tax-exempt to fullest extent permitted by law. Not to get all Tax Attorney about it. Do MCF’s donors ever ask that their contributions be directed at a specific Montecito project?

“Most donations go to our general fund,” Green says, “because the community trusts us to make those decisions. They know our rural road signs, for instance, keep going on and on and on, will always need maintaining. So most donations go into the general fund, with the recent exception of the tremendous outpouring of support for the Triangle Restoration project – to do away with the horrid memory of the devastating debris flow. The town really came out for that.” Is it complicated to ask that a donation be earmarked?

“It’s very simple,” Green says. “When you donate, just say ‘this is for X, Y, or Z’. Your donation goes into that pot and will only be spent on that particular project.”

Astronaut Cernan’s deep space fainting spell notwithstanding, 1966 was the beginning of something wonderful – Montecito’s epoch of community-assisted self-care. Any awed accidental tourist in search of a sody pop will attest to the gorgeous, perennial success of the Montecito Community Foundation’s all-volunteer, heart-driven mission. MCF President Ruth Green sums it all up with still more gray-flannel business-speak.

“This is a place where people can come together and experience one another and experience the joy, really, of living here in Montecito,” she says with some emotion, her pal Alixe nodding emphatically. “That’s what the foundation is about.”