The Cutting Fences Foundation is a nonprofit organization that serves Montana’s farmers, ranchers, and veterans who are living with a disability or illness. They supply agriculture specific adapitve equipment like the Action Trackchair that is pictured above. This equipment allows folks to go places a normal wheelchair could never go, and helps them to maintain their independence and sense of agency. We granted their request for $5,000 to help buy a wheelchair accessable side-by-side.

Montana’s rural communities simply don’t have the budget to operate a full-time fire department, so residents step up and volunteer to protect their neighbor’s lives and property.

There’s no better example of this than the folks in Hogeland, Montana. Hogeland sits about 12 miles from the Canadian border and is roughly 180 miles northeast of Great Falls. We donated $7,000 to buy them new racks and shelves for their fire gear.

The Fairfield Volunteer Fire Department needs to replace their SCBA (Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus) gear, and it’s expensive, to say the least. It’s also important, though, as this gear protects the firefighters from smoke inhalation. We donated $10,000 to help them get new SCBA gear and stay safe in the smoke.

Many of our rural areas around Central Montana don’t have good, if any, cell phone signal, and this can make it impossible for first responders to contact hospitals or others who can help. The Geraldine Community Ambulance team came up with a solution- They’re going to mount a mobile Starlink dish on top of their ambulance, which will provide them with a high-speed internet connection no matter where they go.

Mountain View donated $5,500 to make this project happen.

Continuing with the theme of limited communications in rural areas, the Fort Benton Memorial Ambulance crew needed new portable radios to improve the reliability of their team’s communications.

Mountain View donated $16,000 to purchase these folks all new radios.

The Power Volunteer Fire Department applied for a grant to replace the rusty water tank on a water tender truck, as well as do some upgrades to other equipment. We contributed $10,000 to help get all this done.

The Ulm Volunteer Fire Department is building a massive addition onto their fire hall, but it won’t be just more storage for trucks and equipment- This new addition will be a beautiful new training room / community meeting center where area residents and clubs can meet. We contributed $50,000 to help push this project across the finish line.

MSU-Northern is working on building a brand-new Ag Center. When complete, it will be a multi-purpose facility with an equestrian center and facilities for meetings and community events. We contributed $50,000 to help with phase one of this new construction. Arleen Rice, our Havre area manager (left), presented our check to MSU-Northern Chancellor Greg Kegal and MSU-Norther Foundation Member Melanie Skoyen.

In July of 2023 we donated $50,000 to the Fort Benton VFD for the construction of an addition to their fire hall, and we promised that once they found matching funds for that first donation we would give them another $50,000.

This April, they did just that, and, true to our word, we were thrilled to present them with another $50,000.