Big-Sky Philanthropy

“Try these while they’re hot,” says Pam Kirchoff, setting a tray of caramel breakfast rolls next to a plate of cherry muffins in the gleaming kitchen of the Mountain Sky Guest Ranch. It’s only 6 a.m., but Ms. Kirchoff, the ranch’s pastry chef, is already in a rush: Today she and others who work here will be visiting local charities in between pampering the ranch’s guests with five-course gourmet dinners, horseback rides, and fly-fishing lessons.

After checking out the charities, staff members will choose which groups most deserve to get donations. The money they give away isn’t theirs — it’s donated by the ranch’s owner, Arthur M. Blank, co-founder of Home Depot — but they are responsible for deciding how to spend it. Since 2002, ranch staff members have given more than $1-million from the Mountain Sky Guest Ranch Fund to charities in Montana’s Park and Gallatin Counties.

Ms. Kirchoff remembers the afternoon in 2002 when Mr. Blank called everyone on the staff together to ask whether they would be willing to run a foundation, read grant applications, and evaluate charities, on top of their 10-to-12-hour workdays. She says her reaction was typical of most of the staff: “Wow, what a concept. Sign me up.”

The work is unpaid, but nobody minds, she says.

“We’re working people,” Ms. Kirchoff says, blond braid flying as she whips around to retrieve a yardlong chocolate bar from a high shelf and then begins shaving curls from it for the evening’s Sacher torte, a multitiered cake. “Without the foundation, we’d never have a chance to give anything away except for time and energy.”

The staff members at Mountain Sky range in age from 18 to around 50, but most are younger than 30. Many grew up on farms or ranches. Some were guests here as children who wanted to be part of the ranch as adults. Most guests come back year after year. So do most of the seasonal employees. They say it’s like coming home. “I feel like a mother,” says Shirley Arsenault, the ranch’s general manager.

The caring nature of the ranch’s employees was part of what inspired Mr. Blank to ask them to take on the responsibility of the charitable fund, he says. Mr. Blank bought the ranch five years ago after several vacations here, in part because of the ranch staff’s dedication to serving guests. Besides, he says, “they have deep ties to the area that put them in a great position to identify the most pressing needs,” as compared with the people who run his Atlanta foundation, which awards about $20-million in grants each year.

Staff members agree with him.

“I’ve lived here for 30 years,” says Sally Myers, the ranch’s head housekeeper. “I do my own checkup on these people who apply for grants.”

Several hundred yards away from the kitchen in the main hall, Ms. Myers is taking a break outside a cabin she has just finished cleaning, letting smoke from her cigarette drift away on a pine-scented breeze. At 9 a.m., she’s well into her typical workday. She sits down on an overturned plastic bucket rather than one of the Adirondack-style log chairs on the cabin’s porch. The cabins look rustic but are outfitted with leather chairs and luxurious baths. The rough wood surfaces can be hard to clean, but she’s got a system, Ms. Myers says, hefting a powerful vacuum cleaner.

Ms. Myers has sometimes worked three or four cleaning jobs at a time as a single parent of four. When she couldn’t make ends meet, she turned to local charities for help.

“Kids are my thing,” she says. “Ninety percent of these kids’ groups — Boys & Girls Club, Child Care Connections — at one time or another, while raising my four children here, I’ve used them. I know which ones really help.”

The ranch fund gives mostly to children’s causes, but also makes some grants to environmental groups and to organizations that promote cultural and racial tolerance. About 30 groups applied for grants this year, says Tawnya Rupe, the fund’s director, who also manages the ranch’s gift shop and does some wrangling.

The round of site visits on this particular day includes a trip to the Corporation of the Northern Rockies, a group that encourages sustainable development, the kind that also protects natural resources. Other stops are at an agricultural group and the local United Way. About a dozen ranch hands will come on the day’s visits; others will see different charities over the next several days. The site visits are time-consuming. The visits themselves don’t take long; it’s driving from one place to another in Big Sky country that eats up the hours.

At a Bozeman middle school, 14 people, including several school officials and three fifth graders, are waiting to ask the ranch to pay for buses to bring schoolchildren out to a fair so they can experience life on a farm. The program is sponsored by the Gallatin Valley Agriculture Committee.

Ms. Rupe is skeptical about the need for the two-day fair; after all, this is Montana. “Do you get to be around farm animals?” she asks the children, and is surprised when all three say no. Many of the state’s new residents don’t live on farms or ranches and don’t know much about them, members of the committee say. “A lot of them think their food comes from the grocery store,” says Duane Burkenpas, who coordinates the fair.

At another stop in downtown Bozeman, the blazing sun and flat storefronts on the town’s main street make it look like a setting for a television western. The ranch group steps inside the First Interstate Bank, where they will meet with Carol Townsend, executive director of the Greater Gallatin United Way. Their casual shorts and jeans, plus the ultrahip goatees some of them sport, hardly fit the typical notion of a foundation official. Adam Cleary, 19, the self-described “pool boy,” even has iPod earplugs dangling down his T-shirt.

But their questions are all business as they view a slide presentation by Ms. Townsend. She explains why an after-school program supported by the United Way needs more money than she expected. The problem was that poor families weren’t using the after-school care because they didn’t want to be seen as taking handouts while others paid their share. So the child-care program is now offered free to all, and poor families are finally sending their kids, she says.

The ranch workers nod; they all recognize the desire, typical of many people in this rural Western area, to be able to do for themselves. “People would rather work until their hands are bleeding than take money,” says Troy Batzler, the ranch’s fly-fishing coach.

Back at the ranch, many of Mountain Sky’s employees say they were unfamiliar with charities until they began running the foundation. “I didn’t really know any nonprofit groups, except 4-H,” says Micki Cleary, the head wrangler (and Adam Cleary’s older sister). She is unsaddling the horses that were used for the afternoon ride. She slaps Diablo, a colorful paint horse, on the rump as he heads into the corral.

But Ms. Cleary says she and her co-workers have quickly learned how to evaluate a charity. They received some training from Mr. Blank’s foundation, which continues to advise them and reviews their selections. (The fund is officially managed through the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.)

Their experience running the ranch, they say, gives them a pretty good feel for how much things should cost. Also, they all value the same things, she says: children, the outdoors, personal responsibility.

“We like the programs that get kids out and doing something instead of hanging around town,” she says. “I love the organizations that help kids who don’t have a chance. Who doesn’t think a child is deserving?”

The knowledge they have developed in their work lives helps, too, Ms. Cleary says. One of her favorite grants went to a “horse medicine” program in Park County, where therapists teach troubled children how to care for horses. “It’s neat, the relationships that develop between people and their horses here, so I can see how it would help kids to bond with horses,” she says.

Involvement in the Mountain Sky Fund has deepened the ranch workers’ personal interest in philanthropy. Some now volunteer at charities. Others say they donate some of their own money to favorite causes. They are starting to use the 7,000-acre ranch to help people, offering space to nonprofit groups for meetings and allowing kids from the local Big Brothers Big Sisters to use the facilities — activities Mr. Blank encourages.

The ranch employees have even started to offer some of their own charitable activities, inviting residents of a nearby nursing home out to Mountain Sky for an evening of barbecue and fiddle music. It’s the same event they hold for paying guests, but the experience was completely different. Many of the staff members felt a kinship with the elderly visitors, who, like them, love physical activity and the beauty of the wild.

“The seniors just enjoyed it so much,” says Kristin Kossack, who works in Mountain Sky’s office. “They’d been ranchers here all their lives. They knew the land, knew the neighbors, some of them even had known the Murphys,” the family that built the ranch back in 1929. Some of the guests danced to the fiddle music, she says, even though a few of them had to use walkers.

“It was awesome,” says Scott Wilfling, assistant general manager. “It made us just want to do more next year.”