Laura Kerfoot

Foundations Grants Administrator

Laura project manages the preparation of grant proposals and reports for funders and ensures timely submission. She coordinates and facilitates internal concept meetings with fundraisers, attorneys, and writers. She also develops budgets and financial reports for foundations and other funders.  

“SELC’s place-based mission resonates with me because, like SELC, I am rooted in the south,” she said. “I grew up in rural Louisa, Va., with a deep love of the incredible nature in our own backyards. I find Southerners understand the incredible place in which they live, and the need to protect it, and southern communities don’t sit idly by when neighbors are in need. Every day I leave for work I get to lift up my neighbors—from the next house over all the way to the Alabama shoreline.”  

Laura celebrated SELC’s role in stopping the approval of a huge gas plant proposed in Pittsylvania County, Va. “This showed how many tools SELC has at its disposal beyond litigation,” she said. “We partnered with locals and worked on the ground to help educate, advise, and support a grassroots effort to repel what would’ve been the second-largest gas plant in the country.”  

Now living on a small farm in Madison, Va., Laura isn’t far from the spot both sides of her family have called home for generations, near Dickey Ridge Trail in Front Royal. An annual family breakfast at the visitor’s center created core memories.  

“I will always remember the excitement of helping my grandfather pack the griddle as the sun was beginning to rise and seeing the first buds of dogwood and redbud on the Blue Ridge Parkway This was the official start of spring.” 

• Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Virginia, grants manager 
• Sentara RMH Medical Center, grant writer  
• M.P.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 
• B.A., Virginia Commonwealth University