Lester, president of HindSight, Inc., a non-profit that helps small "giving circles," founded the Community Investment Network Conference that drew about 140 speakers and participants here, many of whom are starting their own community philanthropies.

"These are people who are ordinary citizens who want to give back to their communities," explained Lester. The mostly African American groups who gathered at the third annual CIN Conference are part of a quiet movement in the philanthropic world, especially among people at the other end of the spectrum from the Bill Gates and Z. Smith Reynolds.

Ken Perry of Raleigh is typical. Vice President of Operations at the Methodist Home for Children, Perry and a table-full of his men friends have been meeting for six months to discuss community issues and what they could do to help. Their group is called A LOT, which stands for "A Legacy of Tradition."

"I showed up," said Perry, recounting the first meeting at a Research Triangle Park office. He laughs, "It was really fun, and I didn't want to miss the next meeting." So he kept coming.

"There are about 20-to-25 in the group, and we meet in different places. We talk about things in the [African American] community and things we could do, positive things," he said. Members now are collecting $50 a month contributions to form a fund that they hope to leverage with foundation grants. With the money, they want to make small grants to help various community programs.

Jereann King of Warrenton also attended the conference and listened to speakers such as Linetta Gilbert of the Ford Foundation, former Ambassador James A. Joseph, chair of the Louisiana Recovery Foundation, and Dan Moore of NC Gives, the Raleigh non-profit initiative helping fund the conference.

King is a member of Heritage Quilters, a five-year-old circle of women and men quilters from Warren, Vance and Halifax counties. "We're a diverse group and we encourage the quilting tradition and document old quilts and the various styles of African American quilting," she said.

They have collected a small treasury from the sale of their quilts, many of which are shown at their popular, annual quilt show. She and her fellow quilter Cathy Alston-Kearney see themselves as "community philanthropists" who want to do more to help local young people.

"We have been formulating ideas and we're open to all possibilities," said Alston-Kearney. She and King came to the conference to learn more about using their quilting circle as a basis for a "giving circle." For example, said King, "I came here to learn about fundraising."

The "somebody who will make a difference" for many of the participants at the conference was Lester himself. He has been a missionary for the giving circle concept and was the common thread who helped stitch together many of the CIN groups.

A Cary High School basketball star and Wofford College graduate, Lester is a veteran in non-profit work, having served at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, AmeriCorps, and at the Triangle Community Foundation. He and his wife Dionne, a former electrical engineer at Nortel, founded HindSight in 2001.

In working and learning about foundations and non-profit work, he explained, "I knew I wanted to talk to everyday people about these [philanthropy] tools. I concluded that the way to get people more engaged was in giving circles."

The circles allow people such as Perry and King to pool resources and design programs that help projects and people in their local communities through the help of groups such as community foundations. Perry, for instance, wants to help children read better; King would like to award small scholarships to deserving college students.

"These are people whose stories don't show up on the 5 o'clock news," said Dionne Lester, vice president of HindSight. "They are amazing people doing amazing things." And she and her husband and groups such as NC Gives hope to make them even more amazing.