Rapid City SD –The City of Rapid City has quietly seated the board that will eventually decide which local nonprofits get a share of a permanent, multi-million-dollar endowment — and the nine people on it read less like a cross-section of the community than a directory of the interests already shaping what gets built here.
What the Fund Is
The Rapid City Impact Fund Endowment is a permanent “Field of Interest Fund” held at the Black Hills Area Community Foundation (BHACF).
It was created through a formal agreement between the City and BHACF, authorized by a vote of the Common Council and signed by Mayor Jason Salamun in 2025.
Its stated purpose is to build and steward a corpus of charitable capital that supports recreational, quality-of-life, and nonprofit facilities in Rapid City “in perpetuity.”
The City seeded it with $3 million. The operating agreement records a $500,000 matching contribution from the John T. Vucurevich Foundation, routed through a BHACF holding fund, bringing the endowment to $3.5 million at signing — a figure independently confirmed both by JTVF’s own December 2024 grants announcement and the city’s own Impact Fund Board webpage. (The city’s separate Vision Fund summary materials cite a $400,000 growth figure instead; that appears to be the odd number out, not the $500,000.)
No grants go out until 2030, or until the fund’s value exceeds $6 million — whichever comes first.
Any capital-project grant that is eventually awarded must be 100% matched by non-City funding within 12 months, or the money reverts to the endowment.
Endowment-matching grants must be 100% matched within six months.
Eligible applicants must be nonprofits that have existed at least three years, and any funded project must cost at least $100,000.
Who is Running this Board
An Advisory Board of seven to nine voting members will recommend which nonprofits get funded once the fund is active.
BHACF makes the formal distributions based on those recommendations.
Between 2026 and 2031, the Mayor appoints five of the seats and the Common Council appoints four.
After 2031, the board elects its own successors by majority vote — except for the one seat permanently reserved for a City representative, currently Finance Director Daniel Ainslie.
The other eight seats went to:
- Hani Shafai, of Dream Design International — the same engineering and development firm behind Buffalo North LLC, the entity applying for the Healing Way TIF district, where Shafai is simultaneously the applicant’s manager, the engineer of record, and the manager of the LLC that owns the largest adjacent parcel.
- Kyle Wiese, Sanford Health’s Black Hills President — representing the health system currently building a $500 million, 168-bed hospital campus in southwest Rapid City, funded largely by a $300 million gift from Denny Sanford.
- Paulette Davidson, President and CEO of Monument Health — Sanford’s direct competitor, and the executive who told South Dakota News Watch in November 2025 that Sanford’s new campus could cost Monument as much as $40 million a year in federal revenue and force cuts to services.
- Jim Scull, of Scull Construction, a Rapid City construction company.
- Marnie Herrmann, of Security First Bank.
- Don Warne, M.D., listed on the board as representing the Center for Indigenous Health; he’s also Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health and sits on one of Monument Health’s own governing boards, listed alongside board Chair David Emery and Vice Chair Deidre Budahl on the health system’s official leadership page.
- Briana Vande Pol, of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
- Kristin Conzet, a former South Dakota state representative (District 32, Rapid City), now Executive Director of the Western Dakota Regional Water System, currently lobbying Congress for federal funding on the regional Missouri River pipeline project.
Two of those nine seats — Wiese’s and Davidson’s — belong to the CEOs of Rapid City’s two competing hospital systems, sitting on the same board that will eventually vote on which nonprofit capital projects the city’s philanthropic dollars support.
Opaque Conflict of Interest Reporting
The operating agreement does address conflicts of interest.
Any board member with an actual, potential, or perceived conflict must disclose it in writing to the Advisory Board Chair within 15 business days of becoming aware of it.
A conflicted member can provide information to the board but must recuse from deliberation and leave the room during discussion and the vote.
The Chair may appoint a “disinterested” subcommittee to investigate alternatives, and if none exist, the remaining disinterested members can approve the arrangement by a simple majority — 51% — provided they find it fair, reasonable, and aligned with the fund’s charitable purpose.
In other words, the mechanism relies on board members to self-report their own conflicts, and on their colleagues — several of whom sit on the same board precisely because of their own overlapping interests in the local economy — to judge whether an arrangement is fair.
There’s no independent outside reviewer named in the agreement, and no public-disclosure requirement for when a recusal happens.
What’s Still Open
The fund won’t make its first grant for years, so there’s no allegation here that money has gone anywhere improper. But it’s worth watching from the start rather than after the first controversial grant.
One detail remains unresolved, and this piece leaves it that way rather than pretending otherwise: the city’s own, currently active Impact Fund Board webpage — marked with the asterisk the city uses for boards with open seats — states it is still seeking two community members through the general citizen-interest application, each to serve a one-year term.
That maps directly onto Seats 8 and 9 in the operating agreement, which are built to start with one-year terms.
Whether that means two of the nine names on the signed board roster haven’t actually been seated yet, or the city’s webpage simply hasn’t caught up to a completed board, isn’t clear from the public record as it stands.
It’s also worth asking, at some point, how many times the conflict-of-interest process has already been triggered in board discussions to date .
Sourcing
- Operating Agreement, Advisory Board for the Rapid City Impact Fund Endowment, signed by Mayor Jason Salamun, BHACF President/CEO Chris Huber, and Finance Director Daniel Ainslie (Nov.–Dec. 2025) — LF091626-04 on the Sept. 16, 2026 Legal & Finance Committee agenda
- “Impact Endowment Fund Inaugural Board Members” list, rcgov.org
- “Rapid City Impact Fund” informational page, rcgov.org
- Rapid City Vision Fund Summary (Round VIII, 2025–2029), rcgov.org
- South Dakota News Watch, “Monument could lose millions due to Sanford Health expansion,” Nov. 2025 — Paulette Davidson’s $40M figure
- Monument Health leadership/board page, monument.health — Paulette Davidson’s title; Don Warne’s board listing
- South Dakota War College, “Former State Rep. Kristin Conzet Joins Western Dakota Regional Water System as Executive Director”
- South Dakota Searchlight, on Conzet’s congressional testimony re: the Missouri River pipeline
- John T. Vucurevich Foundation, “JTVF Announces $4.3 Million in Grants to Close 2024” (jtvf.org) — confirms the $500,000 Impact Fund contribution
- City of Rapid City, “Impact Fund Board*” committee page, rcgov.org/public-meetings/city-committees/impact-fund-committee-15641.html — confirms $500,000 Vucurevich figure and the open two-seat citizen-application process
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