Our Founder

Cumberland Community Foundation began as the dream of one woman, Dr. Lucile West Hutaff. Dr. Hutaff, a Fayetteville native, graduated from Fayetteville High School in 1929. She attended Women’s College in Greensboro for two years and received her medical degree from the University of Rochester School of Medicine.

	Cumberland Community Foundation began as the dream of one woman, Dr. Lucile West Hutaff

Dr. Hutaff returned to Fayetteville in 1972 upon her retirement as a professor at Bowman-Gray Medical School in Winston-Salem, NC, and started Cumberland Community Foundation in July 1980 with an unrestricted gift of over $575,000. She had seen The Winston-Salem Foundation in action and wanted to bring this concept to her hometown.In establishing the Cumberland Community Foundation, Dr. Hutaff envisioned an organization that would aim to encourage the application of new ideas and novel ways to improve the quality of cultural and civic life for the community.

Since 1980, the Foundation has awarded more than $19 million in grants.