Winners Include Adams County Community Foundation President & CEO, Ralph M. Serpe

WASHINGTON – Today, the Council on Foundations announced the winners of the 2025 Council Awards, including the new Excellence in Community Foundation Leadership 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 M. Serpe, Adams County Community Foundation (PA) 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.”

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. Ralph’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, Ralph 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, Ralph 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.

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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 www.cof.org