Back in 2012, current cranberry grower Holly Haines left her position as Pine Island CFO to devote herself full time to the Haines Family Foundation. The foundation, created by Holly and Bill Jr. (under the auspice of Bill Sr.) as a tribute to their mother and her championship of schooling for Burlington County residents, is mainly focused on education and health programs in underserved communities in southern New Jersey and Philly, as well as environmental programs and open space/farmland preservation efforts.
“We formed the foundation in 1996, and in the years since, we’ve donated over six million dollars to twenty different organizations and have maintained multi-year programs with about ten of those to make an even bigger impact,” says Holly. “For example, we’ve worked for over ten years with Virtua to put donations towards their mobile breast cancer screening unit as well as their mobile farm markets, which go into communities that lack reliable access to healthier foods. It’s a great program and Virtua’s doing really well with it. We also work with Cathedral Kitchen, which is unique in that they have a café which is open to the public and is staffed by the students from their own culinary training program.”
A sizeable part of Holly’s philanthropic work has been with Habitat Philadelphia, where she was honored with their Good Neighbor award in 2019:
Holly joined our Family Services Committee in 2010 where she helped review Homeownership applications, went on home visits, and advocated for families. Holly stepped up to chair this committee and then joined the board in 2012, serving on the executive committee until 2017.
Over the last 10 years, Holly has created opportunities for more than 80 families to reach the settlement table. And over the course of this time, Holly and her family have generously invested $1.2M in the families of Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia.
It is not a coincidence – Habitat’s growth is tied directly to the Haines Family Foundation’s partnership. Holly has championed homes, homeowners and has also provided critical capacity funding so that we can build more.
Education, of course remains a focus for the foundation. In addition to serving on the Board of Directors for Catholic Partnership Schools (a network “committed to strengthening and sustaining the educational excellence of the Catholic, Pre-K-8 schools that serve the children of Camden”), she has especially enjoyed working with the Bordentown Regional School District. “I started back with them on a small scale in 2014,” she says. “They had basically very little in the way of tech back then, but now I think they have one of the best equipped schools in the county. The teacher I work with is really good at getting development sessions set up for networks, hardware, software, and teacher training. They’re doing so well that during the pandemic they were able to switch to virtual with no problem; all students had access to Chromebooks or tablets or whatever they needed, which was fantastic. The high school is completely equipped and the three elementary schools are also pretty close to having everything they need. We did find out with the switch to distance learning that teachers need to be mobile, so we’re working on getting them better equipment and not keeping them tied to a desktop.”
The entire Haines family is very proud of Holly and everything she’s done and continues to do for the community!