Paul Kennedy and the work of the Walker Area Community Foundation 

Words by Jenny Lynn Davis | Images by Ryan McGill

“I’ve learned throughout my life that nothing I have experienced was by chance—it was all preparation in some shape or form,” Paul Kennedy says as he leans back in his chair, taking a thoughtful glance around his office at the Walker Area Community Foundation. “I don't always know why, and I’m not always in the pursuit of why, but there is a why.”

It wasn’t by chance that, when Kennedy worked as a forester with Procter and Gamble in Georgia in the 1980s, he was assigned to train a recent forestry graduate, Beth Hendrix of Jasper, Alabama. It wasn’t by chance that he and Beth would grow closer as they worked together for almost three years, providing raw materials, and acquiring land for mills. It wasn’t by chance that he and Beth would marry and move to Alabama to enter new chapters of their professional lives. It wasn’t by chance that Paul Kennedy would end up serving the Walker County community every single day.

Kennedy, a native of Villanova, Pennsylvania, has served as President of the Walker Area Community Foundation since May 2007. The Foundation is a nonprofit grantmaking organization that works to build the permanent capital needed in the area to facilitate community conversations, inspire action, and empower partners.

The WACF creates opportunities for greatness for nonprofits, municipalities, schools, and individuals in the Walker County community. Kennedy sees himself as a conductor within the foundation, ensuring the team and the systems work as they should.

“In the early days of the Foundation, everyone did everything. I was one of just three employees,” he recalls. “We have fortunately seen such significant growth since then, that my role has shifted to connecting people and advising practices that help Walker County become what it ought to be.”

Kennedy and his team work daily to achieve the goal of helping Walker County reach its greatest potential. They reinvest millions of dollars into the community annually that help meet the community’s immediate needs, like food, shelter, and safety, but also devise plans that will, in the long-term, remove the circumstances that created those needs to begin with.

“We want to reach the point where members of our community are not worried if they’re living in a safe, sanitary, secure environment—they know they are,” says Kennedy. “The sort of unspoken goal is to be sure the next generation has it better than the current one, and that can be accomplished with the right amounts of dedication and involvement.”

As he leads the Foundation each day, he keeps the intent of its four founders at the forefront of his mind: to fund worthy causes that might otherwise go lacking and to serve as a resource in solving the community’s greatest problems. He uses the leadership of the four men as a metric when making the decisions on how the Foundation can best invest back into the community.

“When John T. Oliver Jr., Pat Willingham, J. George Mitnick, and Larry Drummond created this organization, they very easily could've made it a private foundation, some kind of charitable trust or a hundred other things,” Kennedy says. “But they wanted it to be a public charity, and that allows us to make a much bigger difference in what we do and how we do it. That will always be the motivation behind what we do.”

“We’re more involved with our grantees than a lot of other grantmaking organizations,” Kennedy adds. “We want them to be successful and dream big. It's easy to just give money away, it's harder to give money away wisely and strategically. People don't give us money just to give us money, they charitably invest through us in things that matter to them and things that they believe matter to the community, and we’re a vehicle in dispersing those funds within the community.”

Kennedy’s greatest aspiration is that Walker Countians would come home to Walker County and get involved in refining the community, making it a better place to live, and in the process, bettering themselves. 

“Now and when I’m long gone, I hope that Walker County is a place where people graduate from, go off to college, go experience the world, then come back here and get involved,” Kennedy says. “Run for office, start a business, join a nonprofit. Do something, just don't sit on the sidelines and say, ‘I wish that wasn't the way we are.’ Actively participate in bettering this place for current and future generations.”

Though he is ever present in the community, meeting people and facilitating conversations that lead to change, Paul Kennedy does enjoy the occasional break from his work. He and Beth still enjoy taking in the excitement and adventure of the outdoors through kayaking, hiking, and birdwatching, just as they did when their two sons, Matt, and Daniel, were growing up.

While he doesn’t see himself leaving Walker Area Community Foundation anytime soon, he looks forward to one day having more time to enjoy the outdoors with his family. Until then, he will keep pressing on to better the place he lives.

“Ultimately, I want to see my replacement. I love my job, but when it’s time for me to pass it along to someone, I'd like to think they will love it just as much or more than me,” says Kennedy. “I want them to take it to the next level so Walker County can become what it truly ought to be.” 78