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CNJG's 2018 Annual Meeting & Holiday Luncheon pre-meeting workshop with Michelle Greanias from PEAK Grantmaking focused on how foundation CEO’s, program officers, staff, and trustees could engage internally to put values-based grantmaking into practice.
Walk the Talk Video
Sample bylaws for Community Foundations.
While donor collaboration is not a new concept, the new economic reality has more and more families, foundations and companies looking towards collaboration as a tool to increase their impact on the issues they care about. This primer was created to help donors understand and evaluate if some form of collaboration might be right for them.
The Newark Philanthropic Liaison led a two-year process to develop a municipal economic empowerment blueprint that brings all sectors together in Newark to support resident’s financial health. The resulting document created a financial empowerment continuum that calls on the implementation of a tiered approach that focuses on helping residents stabilize, sustain, and secure their wealth over time. The document was created with grant funds from Cities for Financial Empowerment and in close coordination with the United Way of Greater Newark’s Asset Building Coalition.

This guide was designed to help the state’s philanthropic community understand their ethical, legal, and fiduciary requirements and obligations.
A working glossary of terms to help shape a common language for work in Community Capacity. This glossary is intended to help promote philanthropy's roles in building community capacity by defining core concepts and closely related terms.
President Obama's Hurricane Sandy Task Force released this rebuilding strategy to serve as a model for communities across the nation facing greater risks from extreme weather and to continue helping the Sandy-affected region rebuild. The Rebuilding Strategy contains 69 policy recommendations, many of which have already been adopted, that will help homeowners stay in and repair their homes, strengthen small businesses and revitalize local economies and ensure entire communities are better able to withstand and recover from future storms.
Sample board committee descriptions, including roles and responsibilities of committee members
From the Commonfund, these white papers on investment policy statements, spending policy, board governance and risk tolerance, together with their most recent studies of investments at private and community foundations, operating charities and nonprofit healthcare organizations are made available though CNJG's Investment Forum for Foundations and Endowments.
As a follow-up to our Giving in Indiana study (released earlier this year), Indiana Philanthropy Alliance is pleased to share this snapshot of promising practices for advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in Indiana philanthropy. Throughout our state, foundations are incorporating the values of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) into their organizational cultures; engaging diverse populations as staff, board members, donors, and grantees; and working to make their communities more welcoming places. This report is an effort to capture a sampling of these endeavors.
This publication from Grantmakers for Effective Organizations offers a framework for thinking about how to measure progress and results in place-based and community change initiatives.
Join us at the second NJ Corporate Philanthropy Network meeting of the year which will focus on what specific information you should zero in on when searching for any red flags in non-profit 990’s and financial statements. Seasoned Accountants, Sherise D, Ritter and Lovepreet Buttar, from The Mercadien Group will guide us. We’ll also touch on vetting sponsorship requests and hold our traditional round robin where meeting participants can share their burning questions/issues and lessons learned.
Lovepreet Buttar, Managing Director with Mercadien’s Nonprofit and Human Services Group, has extensive experience performing and overseeing audit engagements for various nonprofit organizations, including associations, schools, private foundations, and health and human services organizations. She is passionate about helping these organizations support their constituents and achieve their mission. She is also head of the firm’s Audit and Assurance practice and is responsible for both firm-wide and engagement-specific quality control matters and overseeing training for various for-profit, not-forprofit and government/public entities. In this role, she helps ensure the firm is using best practices that are compliant with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).
Sherise (Sherry) Ritter is Managing Director and Co-Chair of the The Mercadien Group’s Nonprofit and Human Services Group, as well as the Advisory Services Group. Serving as a trusted advisor, she meets with all of her clients at least once a year to advise them on topics such as tax planning and preparation, identifying risk areas and formulating solutions, strategy to meet growth goals, and multi-state and unrelated business income taxation and filing exposures. Additionally, she helps her clients with strategic planning, process efficiency and improvement studies, and mergers and acquisitions. She also specializes in the areas of cash flow management, accounting systems design, and board governance training.
Cost: Free for CNJG Members; $50 for Non Member Grantmakers
This program is only open to staff and trustees from grantmaking organizations.
Webinar Video
Resources
Blank 990 Form
990 Forms and their Schedules
The Overhead Myth: Crash Course to Fundraising Transparency
Charity Navigator's Assessment of Finances
The F.M. Kirby Foundation in Morristown, New Jersey, has announced that it awarded 266 grants totaling more than $16.8 million in 2024, an increase of over 9 percent year-over-year.
Grants were awarded to organizations working in the areas of education ($4.4 million), human services ($4 million), health ($2.7 million), arts, culture, and humanities ($2.4 million), environment and animals ($1.7 million), public affairs ($1.2 million), and religion ($127,500). More than half the grants (56 percent) were provided as general operating support, and 108 grants (40.6 percent) were awarded to organizations that have been Kirby’s funding partners for more than 25 years. Grants awarded in New Jersey and North Carolina—the foundation’s primary geographic areas of interest—accounted for $10 million in support, nearly 60 percent of all funding
Native Voices Rising is a joint research and re-granting project of Native Americans in Philanthropy and Common Counsel Foundation. This report focuses on the practices and challenges of community organizing and advocacy, focusing on the need for increased investment in and sustained support for American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian communities.
This case study of the Council of Michigan Foundations' Peer Action Learning Network (PALN) is one of six examined in a report from New York University's Wagner Research Center for Leadership in Action, commissioned by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. The PALN case study, along with the other five, explores the power of learning communities to build connections and knowledge to increase organizations’ community impact. It explains ways grantmakers can strategically support these efforts as well as key elements for designing learning communities, executing for success and extending the learning.

The Newark Philanthropic Liaison is a unique partnership between the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers and the City of Newark, supported by several foundations. Read more about the Liaison’s work In these reports. Due to several transitions, there were no written reports between 2015 and 2022.