RALEIGH, N.C. – After nearly a decade of turning money from chastened cigarette makers into grants that pumped life into tobacco communities, a state-created foundation has increasingly dangled big bait for corporate prizes.

The Golden LEAF Foundation still spends on feasibility studies to expand rural broadband service or to encourage sweet potato markets. But this year, it opened its vault by committing $100 million to build an aircraft parts plant in Kinston.

“I think we’re diversifying our strategies,” said Dan Gerlach, who took over as the foundation’s second president in October. “Diversification is important. I think we’ll continue to do investments in agriculture to diversify the agriculture sector. We’ll continue to do more high-quality manufacturing. We’re going to do more on health care.”

Rocky Mount-based Golden LEAF is both a reminder that the money comes from North Carolina’s tobacco-growing heritage and an acronym for Long-term Economic Advancement Foundation. It was created in 1999, months after a landmark 1998 settlement to a lawsuit in which U.S. states sought compensation from cigarette makers for the cost of treating sick smokers.

The foundation was designated by the state to collect half of North Carolina’s share of the master settlement to boost the economies of tobacco-dependent communities.

The Golden LEAF option was an uncommon choice for the settlement money. Of the $56 billion states collected between 2000 and 2005, $1.5 billion, or 2.7 percent, went to economic development efforts for tobacco regions, a Government Accountability Office report said.