In June 2026, The Beaufort Fund was renamed The Four County Fund. The new name is more inclusive of the region the fund represents: Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton, and Jasper counties. Making an impact far beyond Beaufort alone, The Four County Fund represents an interconnected region, with four unique counties that come together to make each other better, stronger, and brighter. The new name represents CCF’s continued commitment to the region as a whole, and a promising future through intentional partnership between donors, nonprofits, and community leaders for the next 25 years and beyond.
25 years later, the Moseses continue to make a difference
Looking back, the signs were certainly there. Joanne and Alan Moses were always the most engaged and inquisitive members of the committee that considered applications for grants from The Beaufort Fund. On site visits, they’d ask pointed questions about how the money would be used, and sometimes even inquire why grantees hadn’t asked for more. Hearing stories about how grants from the fund had impacted a community, Alan Moses would sometimes be driven to tears.
“We kept Kleenex in the car,” recalled Edna Davis, former Southern Regional Vice President for the Coastal Community Foundation, which oversees The Beaufort Fund. “It was wonderful. If Alan or Joanne believed in a project that maybe didn’t get funded or wasn’t in the discussion, they’d fund it themselves. Their impact was immense.”
And it continues to be, 25 years after The Beaufort Fund was established in 1999. The fund is the largest grantmaking program in Coastal Community Foundation history, having distributed more than $28 million to nonprofits across Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton, and Jasper counties. But few knew that the donors who had created the fund were Joanne and Alan Moses, an unassuming couple who had retired to Dataw Island intent on giving away much of the wealth they had accumulated while living in New York.
“They didn’t want anyone to know. They wanted to remain anonymous,” Davis said. “The rest of the committee didn’t know Joanne and Alan had done the funding, so they treated them just like everybody else. That was one of the things they wanted to preserve—they didn’t want to be treated differently as the funders. Maybe later in their lives some suspected it, but no one really knew for sure until they died.”
‘Extraordinary’ impact
Indeed, Joanne and Alan Moses had requested that their generous donation to start The Beaufort Fund remain anonymous until after their passing—they wanted the focus to be on the work, and not themselves. Alan passed at age 87 in 2018, and Joanne at 89 in 2021. Only then was their enormous legacy of giving at last revealed publicly.
“The impact of The Beaufort Fund is just extraordinary,” Davis said. “Even in the five years that I was there, I could see the difference that it was making in the community. One of the things Joanne and Alan did was incentivize groups to work together, which I thought was pretty extraordinary. But on top of that, having a continuous amount of funding coming in to keep the doors open was so important for so many young founders, young grantees that were starting off, and young nonprofits.”
Davis was among the few who knew the true identity of the fund’s founders. Richard Hendry, the longest-serving employee of Coastal Community Foundation, brought her to Dataw Island to have lunch with Joanne and Alan Moses, who revealed their involvement. Davis wanted to know: what motivated these two New Yorkers to make such a large investment in an area they had retired to?
“They both said the same thing—they wanted to make a difference in the community where they lived, and they had chosen Beaufort as their home,” Davis recalled. “They looked at resources in the surrounding counties, Hampton, Colleton and Jasper, and realized Beaufort was much better off than those other counties. But they wanted to be able to make a difference they could see, even in places where there were not the kinds of resources available in Beaufort County. So their motivation was to make the place where they lived better than they found it. And boy, did they ever do that.”
A quarter of a century after their initial endowment, The Beaufort Fund continues to support hundreds of nonprofits and students throughout the four-county area it covers. The fund today offers grants that support young nonprofits, those looking to grow and expand, and those needing operational funds. That latter category was a particular emphasis of Joanne and Alan Moses, who knew nonprofits needed to pay staff and electric bills to perform a greater good.
“Joanne and Alan had a different vision,” Davis said. “They knew that you needed to turn the lights on, you needed to pay rent for a building, you needed to provide transportation. When they set up the fund, they wanted there to be an opportunity for nonprofits to get operational funds, as well as funds to do a specific project. The grantees loved being able to do that. We were probably one of the only funds in the area that allowed that to happen.”
Gregarious and quiet
While they shared a common commitment to philanthropy and a love for their adopted hometown, Joanne and Alan Moses were very different people, Davis recalled. “They disagreed on everything, but they worked together beautifully,” she said. “You could tell they were happy together, but they had such different personalities. Joanne was very gregarious. Alan was real quiet. But when he said something, you wanted to listen.”
Going on site visits with Joanne meant time in the car listening to endless stories about her favorite grant recipients and they work they had done. But the more reserved Alan? “My first time going on a site visit with him, I wondered—what are we going to talk about?” Davis said. “He was so quiet. Particularly if we were going to Hampton or Colleton, we’d have an hour in the car.”
She needn’t have worried. “Once we got in the car, if you asked him the right question, he would take off, and you didn’t have to talk until you got there,” Davis said. “The questions he would ask at site visits were always very insightful, because he had read their proposals, and as a former businessman he was concerned about how they were going to be able to actually do things with the amount of money they were requesting. Oftentimes he felt like they didn’t request enough.”
Alan would sometimes be so moved by the work being done, Davis recalled, that he would leave site visits with tears in his eyes. That’s how much their adopted Lowcountry meant to Joanne and Alan Moses. And even 25 years later, the region continues to benefit from their generosity and the legacy of philanthropy they handed down to others.
“They were such a joy to know,” Davis said. “ I always thought about Alan and Joanne as being really, really good examples of making a difference in the place where they chose to make their home.”
Contribute to the future grantmaking of The Four County Fund here.
