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I Am Trenton Community Foundation is proud to announce awarding $135,000 total through the recent “Making Trenton Even Better” grant program to community champions transforming vacant lots, encouraging art and artists, teaching new skills and providing compassionate support with respect and dignity.

“These community groups will make a real impact across our city and we are excited to support their work,” said IAT Co-President Marelyn Rivera. “Our community faces challenges together, and working together we make Trenton even better.”

Grant Committee Chair Regina Podhorin-Zilinski noted that more than 100 applications were received – and many worthwhile projects were not able to be funded. “This was our most generous grant round ever – with more funding and more applicants than ever before,” she said. “Our only regret is that many good ideas did not receive support – this time.”

How can family philanthropies ensure their internal operations and grantmaking practices are disability- inclusive?

One in four US adults—61 million people—have some type of disability, but few people working in philanthropy self-identify as disabled. There is a growing recognition across the philanthropic sector that to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, it must approach its work through a disability lens. For funders, there are opportunities throughout their work to shift internal operations toward more equitable and values-aligned practices. In this interactive session, we focus on embedding disability and inclusion in operations and learn best practices to embed disability inclusion in their internal practices, processes, and policies.

Cost: This event is free for CNJG Members who are family foundations.
Other types of foundations are ineligible to join this webinar.

This program is a CNJG membership benefit for family foundation members, including staff and trustees, in partnership with the National Center for Family Philanthropy.

How can funders reduce the burden on grantees when requesting demographic data? What information are funders collecting from their nonprofit partners, and what information is needed to make informed decisions and build trusting relationships?

Funders are increasingly requesting demographic data from nonprofits to better understand the types of organizations and leaders that they are—and are not—supporting. Due to the lack of comprehensive and public demographic data available, nonprofits experience a heavy burden to provide the information in a variety of ways and formats.

Join this webinar to learn how to reduce the administrative work for grantees throughout the due diligence and grantmaking processes and beyond. We’ll explore tools that can help streamline the process of collecting, evaluating, and sharing information for mutual benefit.

Cost: This event is free for CNJG Members who are family foundations.
Other types of foundations are ineligible to join this webinar.

This program is a CNJG membership benefit for family foundation members, including staff and trustees, in partnership with the National Center for Family Philanthropy.

The TD Charitable Foundation, the charitable arm of TD Bank, has announced grants totaling $7.2 million to 36 nonprofits in support of housing affordability and stability.

Awarded through the foundation’s annual Housing for Everyone program, grants of $200,000 each will boost solutions for low- to moderate-income (LMI) homeowners struggling to maintain homeownership. Recipients include Rebuilding Together Miami-Dade (Florida), Midcoast Habitat for Humanity (Rockport, Maine), Valley Community Development Corp. (Northampton, Massachusetts), Family Promise of Warren County (Phillipsburg, New Jersey), Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation (Brooklyn, New York), and Greenville Housing Fund (Greenville, South Carolina).

“Amid rising housing costs, these organizations play a vital role in supporting homeowners in communities across TD’s footprint to afford critical repairs, avoid foreclosure, correct tangled titles, and so much more,” said TD Charitable Foundation director Paige Carlson-Heim. “The efforts of the Housing for Everyone grantees are so appreciated, as their work is essential to protecting homeowners and providing long-term stability in our neighborhoods. By supporting these nonprofits, we hope to help mitigate the threat of home loss while ensuring homeowners have the resources and resilience they need to sustain long-term homeownership.”

How can being more transparent about your philanthropy strengthen your relationships and build trust with grantees and partners?

The annual Trust in Nonprofits and Philanthropy Report showed that 57 percent of Americans trust the nonprofit sector—much higher than the government, media, or the business sector. Yet, only 33 percent have trust in the philanthropic sector (primarily private foundations and high net-worth individuals). Why is this and how can family philanthropy increase this trust?

By prioritizing transparency, families can grow trusting relationships with the communities and organizations that they support, be more accountable donors, and ultimately enhance the effectiveness of their philanthropic efforts.

Cost: This event is free for CNJG Members who are family foundations.
Other types of foundations are ineligible to join this webinar.

This program is a CNJG membership benefit for family foundation members, including staff and trustees, in partnership with the National Center for Family Philanthropy.

To dig deeper into causes of, and responses to, structural racism within philanthropy in New Jersey, the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers established a Racial Equity Task Force made up of leaders at CNJG member organizations.

The task force’s mandate is to develop goals and objectives to create a roadmap for action to eliminate the structural racism that for too long has denied opportunity.

“This is a defining time in the history of our state and our nation,” said Maria Vizcarrondo, president and CEO of CNJG. “We are at a crossroads where we have to expose truth and take action for racial equity. Every institution and organization needs to look inward and discover whether it might be contributing to racism, even unknowingly. Our task force will be a forum for thought and a vehicle for action as we figure out how best to leave the middle ground and do the hard work to support systemic change. Philanthropy must invest resources towards advocacy to affect policy, and take that big leap away.”

Annette Strickland, executive director of the Schumann Fund for New Jersey and a CNJG Board member, will chair the task force. “The current health and racial crisis has brought into focus the impacts of structural racism on American society, she said. “Now is the time for us to explicitly examine the role that we as individuals and philanthropy as a professional practice contribute to those structures. To quote Martin Luther King, ‘Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.’”

Joining her on the task force are: Craig Drinkard, deputy director of the Victoria Foundation, CNJG Board member; Jeffrey Vega, president and CEO, Princeton Area Community Foundation and CNJG Board member; Jeremy Grunin, president, the Grunin Foundation and CNJG Board member; Kiki Jamieson, president, The Fund for New Jersey and former CNJG Board member; Melissa Litwin, program director, The Henry and Marilyn Taub Foundation, CNJG Board member; and Sharnita Johnson arts program director, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

The Council of New Jersey Grantmakers is a nonprofit organization that exists to strengthen and promote effective philanthropy throughout the state. It supports independent, corporate, family and community foundations, as well as public grantmakers, in addressing society’s most difficult problems and providing leadership on statewide issues. About 2,300 grantmaking entities make up New Jersey’s philanthropic sector. They award more than $42 billion in grants annually.

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The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey (HFNJ) is pleased to announce that it has awarded $2,886,777 to twenty-one New Jersey non-profit organizations in the third quarter of 2022.

The largest grant this cycle is a one-million-dollar award to Summit’s Overlook Medical Center to modernize and expand the hospital’s maternity health center. The redesigned unit will be equipped to ensure safe, effective, and family-centered care in a state-of-the-art environment, and will be a key part of Overlook’s broader efforts to equitably service their growing population of diverse and high-risk patients. This aligns with The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey’s priority of supporting programming that facilitates greater health equity for all. The renovation will create 37 private maternity rooms and four high-risk rooms that will enable birthing mothers and their families to be together in privacy and will involve moving the entire mother/baby floor so it is adjacent to the neo-natal intensive care unit.

Several other projects awarded this cycle also address reproductive and maternal health. Two local Planned Parenthood organizations - Planned Parenthood of Northern, Central, Southern NJ and Planned Parenthood of Metro New Jersey – received two grants totaling $361,807 to support patient navigators, who will help assure excellent reproductive and health care for all patients in need of service. Requests for assistance from Planned Parenthood have increased dramatically in the past several months. A $109,623 grant to the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute will create a training program to help perinatal community health workers identify the signs of mental illness among patients and connect them to support services.

“This quarter The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey received and vetted a record number of grant proposals, which is a reflection of the urgent and growing needs in the communities we serve,” said Michael Schmidt, Executive Director and CEO of The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey. “In addition to maternal and reproductive health, the projects we supported this quarter address an array of human needs – from dental care for children, veterans, and Holocaust survivors to access to nutritious foods to helping children receive quality mental health care in the wake of the pandemic, which remains a continuing focus of our grantmaking in 2022.”