March 2023
Melissa Freeman
Last October, the Oregon Venture Fund (OVF) management team spent time in Southern Oregon, visiting the cities of Medford and Ashland. We had the privilege of meeting Laura Olson, Executive Director of the Patricia (Rusty) D. & William B. Smullin Foundation and learned about the Foundation’s commitment to improving the education and health outcomes of people living in Northern California and Southern Oregon.
The Smullin Foundation was made possible by the entrepreneurial spirit of William Brothers Smullin (1907-1995) and his wife Patricia D. (Rusty) Smullin (1918-1998). Mr. Smullin was a long-time Oregon and California businessman with a passion for journalism and broadcasting. He is known for building radio, television and cable systems up and down the West Coast, from Sacramento California to Salem Oregon. Mr. Smullin founded the first VHF television station in Medford (now KOBI-TV) in 1953, and later Pacific Teletronics, an early microwave private carrier to relay television programming from San Francisco, Sacramento, and Portland for carriage on his cable systems. Television stations in Medford, Klamath Falls, and Eugene continue to operate as California Oregon Broadcasting Inc, the second-oldest family-owned enterprise of its kind in the nation.
Since 1990, the Smullin Foundation Board of Directors has approved over $17M in grants to nonprofits serving people across 20 counties in Oregon and Northern California. The Foundation generously supports service providers who meet food, housing, and other health related needs in addition to improving access to higher education. Smullin Foundation scholarship funds are established at six different colleges and universities including Cal Poly Humboldt, Oregon Institute of Technology, Rogue Community College, Southern Oregon University, SW Oregon Community College and Willamette University. “Our board has a long history of supporting nonprofits and scholars in Southern Oregon but recently began to explore putting more of our endowment to work in investments specific to our region,” said Olson. “By investing in startups through Oregon Venture Fund, we feel we are strategically increasing our impact.”
We are pleased that the Smullin Foundation Board of Directors is carrying on their Founder’s commitment to innovation, entrepreneurship and improving economic vitality by recently committing to invest $250,000 in the OVF XV Fund. OVF is in its 17th year of backing Oregon and Southern Washington-based startups.
The OVF XV Fund is currently open to accredited investors, please contact Melissa Freeman, Director of Capital Raising and Investor Relations, 503-539-8021 or Melissa@oregonventurefund.com.