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At its Annual Awards Meeting on June 5, Impact100 Garden State announced four recipients of $100,000 grants. The recipients are:

Cheshire Home, a provider of short-term rehabilitation for adults with spinal injuries and neurological impairments, for its program “Helping Paralyzed Young Adults Rise&Walk Again”
Comfort Zone Camp for its program “Free New Jersey Bereavement Camp Where Children Learn to Grieve, Heal and Grow”
The Institute of Music for Children for its program “Arts Access for High-Need Children
Table to Table for its program “Food Rescue Heroes: Bridging the Gap Between Food Waste and Hunger.”

The three remaining finalists each received a $3,000 Merit Grant. They are:
Housing Partnership for Morris County
Passaic County Community College Foundation
Rebuilding Together North Jersey

The all-women, all-volunteer Impact100 Garden State organization pools member contributions to make high-impact grants. The group has donated more than $3.5 million to area nonprofits since it began grant-giving in 2013. This year a record membership of 408 women allowed Impact100 Garden State to give four $100,000 grants for the first time.

Programming for the Emerging Leaders group is geared towards early and mid-career professionals and will serve as: a professional learning community for emerging professionals working in diverse positions; an opportunity for professional development and individual capacity-building that will lead to institutional change within the member organizations; and as a critical partner in the creation of a pipeline into senior/executive leadership in NJ philanthropy. This meeting will focus on current trends in Philanthropy from the perspective of Brandon McKoy, President of the Fund for New Jersey, who brings a wealth of knowledge as someone who first served as a Program Associate at the Fund.

Brandon McKoy is President of the Fund for New Jersey and is an established leader in public policy analysis and advocacy statewide and nationally. Returning to The Fund for New Jersey in 2024 served as a homecoming given that Brandon worked as a Program Associate at the organization and served as its first philanthropy fellow from 2012 to 2014.

Brandon is well known for his accomplishments from his time at New Jersey Policy Perspective, where he held several roles over the course of seven years, first as a State Policy Fellow through the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ program, next as a Policy Analyst, and then as Director of Government and Public Affairs, before assuming leadership of the organization as NJPP’s President from 2019 through late 2021.

Cost: Free for CNJG Members; $50 for Non Member Grantmakers

Alexis Bivens, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Managing Director of the Supporting Organizing Work Funders Collaborative, Connecticut Council on Philanthropy, presents the process and progress of how an affinity group transformed into a funders collaborative, how it was resourced, and challenges along the way.

Foundations Facilitate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Partnering with Community and Nonprofits, a new report by the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, confirms that foundations can, in fact, facilitate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) through their grantmaking processes and their partnerships with nonprofits—and identifies eight specific practices for foundations to emulate.

The report takes a deep dive into the work of nine foundations that represent a diverse cross-section of types and sizes, and offers useful lessons about how foundations can better partner with nonprofits to be more effective in their work.