The Warren County Foundation is a community foundation, which is a special category of not-for-profit organization. Community foundations such as ours exist to make it easy for people to be charitable and to build an endowment to meet changing community needs over time.

They were started in 1914 by a Cleveland banker who felt that the practices of the day were needlessly eroding charitable funds. It was expensive to administer charitable trusts in banks, which knew more about investing money than giving it away. And it was expensive to go to court when charitable funds had outlasted their purposes and needed to be altered to stay useful.

The banker proposed an organization, governed by civic leaders, that would handle permanent funds for charitable individuals and distribute grants to good causes in their names. The community foundation would enjoy economies of scale, offering professional management to the affluent and modest donors alike. Banks would continue to manage the investment of principal and the civic leaders would see to it that donors wishes were carried out.

The Warren County Foundation was founded in 1997, when a group of community leaders and philanthropists created the organization as a means to preserve Warren County wealth and charitable dollars for the good of the county's citizens. The Foundation now manages and administers a number of different charitable funds and distributes income from its endowment funds to community charitable organizations and scholarship programs.

The Foundation works with individual donors, or with their financial and/or legal advisors to determine appropriate methods and instruments for giving, always sensitive to what is best not only for the needs of the community, but also what is best for the donor.