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These guides are designed to help foundations consider how more diverse and inclusive practices might advance their mission by making their work more effective and more reflective of communities served. By highlighting 10 ways foundations can approach diversity, this guide seeks to spark ideas and launch further dialogue.
There are three versions of this resource one for family, community and independent foundations.
Seeking to increase their philanthropic impact, many engaged foundations are turning to impact investing. The reason is clear: The field and practice of impact investing have matured—structures are in place, best practices have emerged, and opportunities have multiplied—enabling more foundations to use this powerful tool. Yet entering unfamiliar terrain can be intimidating, and foundations with few or no staff face unique challenges even as they enjoy unique opportunities.
Essentials of Impact Investing: A Guide for Small-Staffed Foundations addresses those challenges and highlights those opportunities. The guide demystifies the process of designing and implementing an effective impact investing strategy, offering advice, tools, and real-world examples of impact investing by foundations with few or no staff.
Foundations are systems. They have their own cultures and related assumptions, norms, standards, and practices. All of these personal, social, and structural factors affect our ability to learn.
This tool is to help foundations take stock of their learning needs and opportunities with a dispassionate (evaluative) look at themselves as systems and how people work within them.
The tool is based on the work of systems theorist Donella Meadows. Her work resonates because it recognizes both systemic constraints and possible leverage points for addressing them. Meadows identifies a series of leverage points for changing a system, ordered from least to most powerful. We adapted her work to show how each lever can reinforce learning in an organization or system.
Use the tool to examine the list of 12 leverage points, ordered in terms of their power for shifting a system to support learning, from weakest (1) to strongest (12). Higher leverage points produce stronger, broader, more durable change.
According to Meadows, we often are disappointed in the results of systems change efforts because we tend to tweak the least powerful levers in the system — such as skill building or the flow of resources or information. We find this can be true with learning in philanthropy, where many foundations support learning with tools and training alone.
Which leverage points are you currently using to support learning in philanthropy? Where else can you push to make that support stronger?
Two different CNJG members queried the CEO listserve on how/when/how to return to the office following the COVID-19 pandemic. CNJG staff compiled the answers from the responding members removing identifying information of the respondents.
Bank of America is making a $560,000 donation to the Career Services Center at New Jersey City University to aid in the effort to help students of color successfully complete the education and training necessary to enter the workforce and embark on a path to success.
The unique grant is the largest single corporate gift and most significant investment in career development in NJCU’s history, school officials said. The investment is in the form of a four-year grant that will address racial, ethnic and income inequality.
Access to good jobs and meaningful careers is key to closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap. Students of color often face daunting challenges, including financial hardship, lack of guidance in choosing courses that will help them achieve success, and lack of internship and skill-building opportunities to prepare for career readiness.
Bank of America officials said the company is working to address these issues as part of its $1.25 billion, five-year commitment to help advance racial equality and create economic opportunity by focusing on priority areas of jobs/education/skills, health, small business and housing.
This weekly funder briefing webinar series welcomed New Jersey-based grantmakers along with national funders and provided an opportunity for grantmakers to hear from a wide range of nonprofit experts. This series started on March 13, 2025, less than a month after the first executive order was issued and continued through April 24, 2025. The written summaries of each recording are listed below.