Council on Foundations Celebrates 2025 Award Winners

WASHINGTON – Today, the Council on Foundations announced the winners of the 2025 Council Awards, including two new awards - the Excellence in Community Foundation Leadership Award and Building Together Award. The winners include:

• Distinguished Service Award: Rip Rapson, Kresge Foundation President and CEO
• Outstanding Corporate Philanthropy Leadership Award: Charu Adesnik, Cisco Foundation Executive Director
• Scrivner Award: Segal Family Foundation
• [NEW] Excellence in Community Foundation Leadership Award: Ralph Serpe, Adams County Community Foundation President and CEO
• [NEW] Building Together Award: Innovia Foundation

The new Excellence in Community Foundation Leadership Award is presented to a leader of a community foundation demonstrating years of vision, leadership, impact, and elevation of community philanthropy.

The new Building Together Award recognizes philanthropic organizations, initiatives, and/or collaboratives that invest in and/or adopt approaches that help us connect and collaborate across differences.

“The Council Awards program recognizes the best of philanthropy. This year’s winners led policy changes that expanded charitable resources and made it easier to give, oversaw global efforts to improve more than one billion lives, connected communities across differences, and much more,” said Council on Foundations President and CEO Kathleen Enright. “During a difficult year, these individuals and organizations demonstrated how charitable foundations will continue to meet new challenges with commitment, creativity, and care.”

Distinguished Service Award

Awarded for over 40 years, the Distinguished Service Award, one of philanthropy’s highest honors, celebrates a visionary leader who inspires and embodies the qualities that define excellence in philanthropy, including commitment, courage, entrepreneurship, and impact.

Rip Rapson, Kresge Foundation President and CEO, is the latest in a long line of distinguished winners, with his legacy, influence, and sector-defining leadership standing out. Rapson has led the Kresge Foundation since 2006, helping to transform the foundation from a traditional grantmaker into a national model for strategic, community-centered philanthropy, deeply impacting Detroit and the broader sector.

Rapson championed Kresge’s unprecedented $100 million commitment to help the city swiftly resolve its bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis and helped engineer the grantmaker’s focus on funding physical infrastructure to one that now builds organizational infrastructure - strengthening relationships, empowering communities, and rebalancing power dynamics to enable residents to lead their own transformations. Celebrating his 20th anniversary at Kresge this year, Rapson is now guiding the foundation to relocate its headquarters back to Detroit after more than five decades, demonstrating that philanthropy’s greatest impact often comes when it is deeply rooted in the communities it serves.

Outstanding Corporate Philanthropy Leadership Award

The Outstanding Corporate Philanthropy Leadership Award is presented to an individual at a corporate foundation or giving program who excels in building partnerships and pursuing corporate social responsibility.

Charu Adesnik, Cisco Foundation Executive Director and Cisco Director of Social Impact Investments, oversees the mission, vision, strategy, programs, and governance of the foundation while also leading Cisco's strategic investments of cash, donations of Cisco technology, and employee expertise to support nonprofits. Under her leadership, the foundation has focused on investing in proximity, backing organizations where staff are based in the communities they serve, with a focus on jointly identifying challenges, opportunities, and community centric solutions. Nonprofit partners consistently describe their experience with the foundation as collaborative and high-touch, and as a genuine partnership rather than a transactional relationship.

Adesnik helped Cisco achieve its 10-year goal of positively impacting 1.1 billion lives a year ahead of schedule, while also helping nonprofit partners secure new funding avenues for the long term. In FY25 alone, the foundation helped catalyze $42 million in new funding, which nonprofit partners directly attributed to Cisco’s support. Adesnik is now leading Cisco into its next big initiative – 40 Communities, which will see Cisco engage, support, and invest deeply in 40 communities across the globe over the next 10 years.

Scrivner Award

The Scrivner Award, presented since 1984, honors an innovative grantmaking organization with a combination of vision, principle, and personal commitment that is making a critical difference in a creative way.

Founded by the late Barry Segal, the Segal Family Foundation is the second-largest U.S. grantmaker in Sub-Saharan Africa, championing predominantly local African organizations for over half a decade. The organization funds a portfolio of over 300 organizations, 96% of which are African led. All its grantee partners receive unrestricted grants, most on a long-term basis.

The foundation is creating new and better ways of operating to shift the approaches Western funders employ in their African-focused philanthropy. Hosting convenings such as their Donor Salon, Segal Connect, and Spotlight Africa, the foundation is intentional about bringing together sector members in comfortable environments. Their Curated Connections program links organizations and leaders in their portfolio to like-minded funders, and to one another. These connections are catalytic and bear fruit: grantee partners organize peer learning site visits and collaborate on projects across countries.

By the end of 2024, the foundation had driven just over $48 million in value to their partners, and in addition to their philanthropic advisory services, Segal is also home to The Multiplier, a donor-advised fund that serves as a vehicle for wider impact in championing the work of local African organizations, as well as a debt facility that has now provided loans to more than ten early stage African-led companies.

Excellence in Community Foundation Leadership Award

Over the course of a 25-year career, Ralph M. Serpe, Adams County Community Foundation President and CEO, has relentlessly championed community philanthropy with uncommon vision, courage, and effectiveness across four community foundations.

He has shaped and led major policy changes, including changing Pennsylvania’s interstate succession laws to create a local, endowed, charitable option for the assets of Pennsylvanians who died without a will or family. In Maryland, he helped pass the Endow Maryland Tax Credit and began work on removing scholarship displacement - the practice of colleges reducing students' financial aid by the amount of private scholarships, something he helped eliminate at public colleges in Pennsylvania. Serpe’s current legislative work includes advancing federal tax exemption for post-graduate scholarship awards and changing the charitable status of cemeteries so they can receive charitable grants.

At the Adams County Community Foundation, Serpe introduced a “forever gift” option to their annual give day allowing any donor, at any level, to contribute to a nonprofit’s endowed fund. Today, 114 nonprofits benefit from newly created designated endowment funds at the community foundation, including small, community-based nonprofits that were once excluded from endowments that now receive annual, predictable grants that strengthen their missions for the long term.

Since 2007, he has led groups of community foundation peers in year-long exercises focused on building unrestricted assets, exchanging best practices, and holding one another accountable for measurable progress, with more than 350 community foundations participating.

Building Together Award

Spanning 20 counties and six Tribal Nations, the Innovia Foundation serves a region in Eastern Washington and North Idaho home to more than 1.1 million people whose political, cultural, and geographic diversity reflects both extraordinary richness and persistent divides. In this complex environment, Innovia has embraced its responsibility to serve as a connector, convener, and catalyst for belonging—creating spaces where people with divergent perspectives can meaningfully engage to shape a shared future.

In its regional Curious Conversations Book Club, developed in partnership with local paper The Spokesman-Review, the foundation helps facilitate shared reading and community discussions on topics such as racial healing and civil discourse, allowing hundreds of residents to connect with those who hold different worldviews.

In 2024, Innovia launched Community Heart & Soul, a nationally recognized model for resident-driven planning in small towns. Eight rural communities were selected for two-year grants that support story-gathering, a community network analysis, and inclusive decision-making. By helping towns identify what matters most to residents, and ensuring historically underrepresented voices shape the community’s vision, Heart & Soul has built trust, belonging, and long-term community capacity.

Whether convening residents for courageous conversations, empowering local leaders through councils and summits, supporting rural storytelling and vision setting, or funding community gatherings to bridge divides, Innovia consistently demonstrates intentionality, depth, and measurable impact in connecting and collaborating across differences.

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About the Council on Foundations

The Council on Foundations is a nonprofit membership association that serves as a guide for philanthropies as they advance the greater good. Building on our over 75-year history, the Council supports over 1,000 member organizations in the United States and around the world to build trust in philanthropy, expand pathways to giving, engage broader perspectives, and co-create solutions that will lead to a better future for all. Learn more about the Council and become a member by visiting cof.org.