Texas Catholic Letters
November 15, 2007
Mr. Frank Santoni
Catholic Campus Ministry
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas
Dear Frank,
It was nice to see you, Anna LeBlanc and Erin Duffy at the recent grant presentations. As always, The Catholic Foundation is pleased to be able to support the great work you are doing with the Catholic student population at SMU. It is amazing that approximately 25% of the SMU student body is Catholic. The need for your work is obvious from that fact alone.
As you probably noticed we awarded many grants at the ceremony. Twenty-five grants totaling $752,203 were presented and, as always, they went towards virtually every cause you can think of from repairing leaky roofs to reading literacy programs to the justice education program that Erin will lead at SMU.
Every time we present grants the great works being carried out within our Diocese and the need to support them are very evident. As our chairman Len Ruby said, “We should all be thankful for the foresight of our founders in recognizing the benefits an organization such as The Catholic Foundation could bring to the community.”
Just in my years at the Foundation unrestricted grants have totaled over $18 million and donor advised funds have added millions more to that amount—a lot of Catholic philanthropy.
All of this does not happen without benefactors and we are always thankful to them. The challenge the Foundation faces is to convince all of our community that its support is important to insure that our grants will continue to be able to meet all of our community’s needs.
Congratulations, Happy Thanksgiving and God Bless.
Sincerely,
Edwin M. Schaffler
President and Chief Executive Officer