As a small business owner, Farm Bureau Insurance agent Neil Hazelbaker learned that any successful venture requires hard work, dedication, and a healthy dose of planning. As a founding member of the Magic Valley Youth Foundation charitable organization, Neil is getting to impart these lessons to a new generation of young entrepreneurs.

 

The Magic Valley Youth Foundation was established in 2014 to help Magic Valley-area youth pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. Besides awarding over $35,000 in grants since 2014, the Foundation was recently awarded $30,000 from the "Chobani Community Impact Fund" initiative.

 

Since Neil is championing the hard-won lessons he learned about calculated risk-taking while growing his agency, it’s a bit of a surprise to learn how the Magic Valley Youth Foundation came about. “We kind of jumped the gun,” Neil admits. “But if we hadn’t, things might not have worked out as well as they did for the Foundation.”

 

What follows is an inspiring tale long on vision but a little bit short on planning.

 

HOW ARE WE GOING TO RAISE THE MONEY?

The idea for the Foundation originated with Randy Palmer, a former Farm Bureau Insurance regional manager in Twin Falls. “Randy approached me and a couple of other agents with this idea of a foundation that would raise money and provide grants to young entrepreneurs who wanted to start or grow a business,” Neil says. “He also wanted some kind of vehicle for Farm Bureau agents to give back to the community that wasn’t tied to insurance, something that would put us out in the community and show that agents were doing something to give back.”

 

Randy, Neil, and the other agents worked to set up the Foundation as a non-profit entity. After this was accomplished, they had just one more obstacle. “We set up the foundation before we had any plan to fund it. We were wondering how we were going to raise money for it.”

 

THE RON BOYD MEMORIAL GOLF SCRAMBLE

Randy had several ideas for raising funds, but the one the Foundation eventually settled on came from Neil. “This was around the time we lost Ron Boyd,” Neil says. Ron Boyd was a long-time Farm Bureau agent and agency manager who retired in 2011 and passed away in 2014. “For so many of us, Ron was a mentor and very important person in our lives.” Ron also loved children. “He was the guy, whenever your kids needed to raise money for school, would never say no. He wrote a lot of checks and supported the kids.”

 

As a way to both honor Ron and raise money for the Foundation, Neil came up with the idea for the “Ron Boyd Memorial Golf Scramble,” a successful fundraiser now in its seventh year. Since 2014, the Scramble has enabled the Foundation to award over $35,000 in grants to young entrepreneurs.

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“The Scramble has been the primary fundraising source for the Foundation since 2014,” Neil says. “Each tournament has brought in between $6,000 to $10,000.”

 

THE $50,000 QUESTION

But Randy had bigger plans for the Foundation. “Randy was always a big thinker," Neil says. "I think in his mind he saw the Foundation as an endowment fund.”

 

An endowment fund is a financial asset, typically held by a non-profit organization like the Foundation, which contains the capital investments and related earnings that are leveraged to carry out the organization’s mission.

 

“For this to happen, we kind of jumped the gun,” Neil says. “We had contacted the Idaho Foundation, which is basically just a foundation that manages money for other foundations.” The only problem was they didn’t know the Idaho Foundation required $50,000 up front. “We had $8,000, which we put down as a deposit [and was later returned] with the idea that we’d hit the $50,000 mark in five years.”

 

But the Foundation’s objectives changed when Randy left the company in 2016. “Instead of trying to grow the Foundation into an endowment, we decided to just raise money and distribute it to the kids each year.”

 

FORTUNES FLIP WITH CHOBANI

A new avenue for raising money opened in 2019 when the Twin Falls yogurt plant, Chobani, announced its "Community Impact Fund" initiative. Like the Magic Valley Youth Foundation, the Community Impact Fund was established to foster economic development and entrepreneurship. Unlike the Foundation though, the Impact Fund was an endowment, and they had also gone through the Idaho Foundation to achieve this status. Neil discovered this fact after he had applied to the Impact Fund for grants for the Foundation.

 

“The Idaho Foundation helped review the applications the Chobani Impact Fund received, and they remembered us from when we’d applied to them to become an endowment. So they already knew about the good things we were doing.”

 

Out of 20 initial applications, the Idaho Foundation / Community Impact Fund awarded five grants in 2019. One of those was to the Magic Valley Youth Foundation for $30,000.

 

"HAPPY TURKEYS TASTE BETTER"

One grant the Magic Valley Youth Foundation awarded was to a 12-year-old Twin Falls girl who lived on a farm and wanted to raise and sell free-range turkeys. “She had a logo, packaging, and a slogan – ‘Happy Turkeys Taste Better’”, Neil says. The girl started her business with 20 turkeys and the foundation’s seed money. Then, Neil says, she found a store in Hailey that wanted every turkey she could provide. “The store processes the turkey and sells it for $10 a pound. They can’t keep it in stock.”

 

The girl recently let Neil know that the market has asked her to raise Cornish game hens, along with ducks and geese. “She’s now selling the Cornish game hens and looking at other things. The initial investment from the Magic Valley Youth Foundation has turned into quite a business for her.”

 

A SAFE BET

Another Foundation grant recipient was a 12-year-old boy whose grandfather had taught him to weld. “He took the $500 grant from the Foundation and invested it in raw materials. Then he built a gun safe and hired an auto body shop to apply a custom paint job, using his last name as the manufacturer.” The safe sold at an auction for $3,500.

 

LEARNING FROM FAILURES

Besides the successes the kids experience, Neil has found their failures to be just as enlightening. “The kids have learned that they can’t just get a pool of money and succeed. Sometimes things happen that are beyond their control.”

 

Some recipients have invested in an animal and, because of the weather, the animal died or didn’t make weight so they could show it. Another grant recipient invested in an animal that was killed in a barn fire.

 

“We’ve had disappointments, but the kids learn from that. They adapt, they come back and make another application the next year. They learn real life lessons and that you’re not guaranteed success just because you have an idea.”

 

IT’S NOT A HANDOUT

It’s important to Neil for people to know that the kids don’t just send a letter and receive money. “They have to work for it,” he explains. “It’s a four-part application process. We require an application, three letters of recommendation, and a three-year business plan.”

 

The final part of the application process is a face-to-face interview. “We had one girl who got a grant the year before come in the next year,” Neil recalls. “But she hadn’t put any time into her application, and she didn’t seem interested at her interview.” The Foundation decided against giving her a second grant. “Her teacher later told us that that was the best thing that could have happened to her because she recognized there was no guarantee. You have to do your best work all time.”

 

“WE COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOUR INVESTMENT”

The Foundation has received countless notes of thanks from the kids. “They’ll send cards thanking us, saying they couldn’t have done it without our investment. So it’s been a fun, really rewarding thing, to feel like you’re helping the kids, and then see how much they appreciate it.”

 

Planned or not, the success of the Magic Valley Youth Foundation and the young entrepreneurs it has helped can teach us all the importance of individual enterprise, initiative, and a little luck.

 

For more information about the Magic Youth Valley Foundation, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please contact Neil at (208) 733-1329, or nhazelbaker@idfbins.com.

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