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The Montclair Foundation is proud to announce the awarding of $90,000 in grants to 17 local nonprofit organizations through its Spring 2025 grant cycle. These grants will support critical initiatives in the areas of Education, Community Service and Cultural Arts — continuing the Foundation’s long-standing commitment to nurturing and strengthening the greater Montclair community.

Thanks to the success of the Foundation’s recent capital campaign, this grant cycle includes several larger awards and a multi-year grant, reflecting an exciting new chapter of expanded community investment.

“We are incredibly grateful to our donors and supporters whose generosity through our capital campaign has allowed us to increase both the scope and impact of our grantmaking,” said Peggy Deehan, Chair of the Grants Committee. “Montclair is home to so many extraordinary organizations making a meaningful difference every day. It’s a privilege to partner with them in creating a more vibrant, inclusive, and compassionate community.”

This season’s recipients include organizations providing emergency medical services, youth tutoring and mentoring, early childhood care, community wellness, arts education, and cultural programming. Among the highlights is a multi-year grant to Imani — the inaugural recipient of the newly established Emer Featherstone Education Grant, named in honor of our esteemed past Board Chair - and a $15,000 grant to the Montclair Ambulance Unit to support a critical outreach campaign. The Foundation extends its sincere appreciation to all applicants for their dedication and invaluable work in the community.

CNJG is helping track philanthropy’s response to the coronavirus pandemic by continuing our “Get on the Map” Campaign partnership with Candid who has launched a new coronavirus map in response to funders requests.

It is critical to be transparent and share this information with other funders to help inform your philanthropy in the coming weeks and months. The information gathered will be publicly available and updated daily at candid.org/coronavirus. Knowing where money is going and how, and having the latest information from organizations, facilitates thoughtful collaboration and decision-making in times of crisis.

You can see a list of grants meant to benefit New Jersey, or
A link to highlight grantmaking by funders in New Jersey.

You can also use different filters to, for example, see grantmaking by funders in Bergen County.

They are also working on making their response funds page filterable by geographic area served. A list of the current New Jersey response funds is available here.

As you can see from any of these “live” maps, the information they have collected is not complete, and this is where we need YOUR help!

Please visit our Share Your Giving Data webpage for information about how to share your data.

If you have any questions on how to submit your data, about the map, or how to include your response fund, please contact Craig Weinrich, CNJG’s Director of Member Services. Thank you in advance for your assistance in getting a more complete picture of New Jersey’s philanthropic response to COVID-19.

CNJG provides this information free to the philanthropic community. If you are not a CNJG member, please join so you can take full advantage of the many benefits of membership and help underwrite the cost of services like this.

Adopted by the CNJG Board of Trustees October 20, 2023

Each principle begins with a common understanding followed by developmental steps for members beginning to look at these principles as well as the aspiration for each principle. These principles are intended to promote continuous learning, vulnerability, and reflection for how philanthropy can evolve from its historical roots to a more trusting, accountable, and equitable model.

The principles include:
1. Ethical Leadership
2. Stewardship
3. Values
4. Equity & Justice
5. Community Engagement
6. Public Voice
7. Continuous Learning
8. Transparency & Accountability

1. Ethical Leadership

Understand:
We believe that ethical leadership is required to build and maintain community trust in philanthropy. This is achieved through adherence to laws, good governance and community- informed decision-making.

Begin:
We serve our partners and communities in a way that engenders trust. We adhere to all applicable laws and take seriously our fiduciary duties. In order to maintain trust, we seek to continuously improve our governance, decision-making processes and organizational culture.

Aspire:
We actively engage the community in our governance and decision-making, balancing donor intent and community need. We strengthen community trust by including new and diverse voices on our governing bodies and decision-making teams.

2. Stewardship

Understand:
As philanthropic entities established for charitable purposes, we operate with a privileged tax status. We recognize that, in addition to money, foundation assets include investments, relationships, human resources, connections and networks, knowledge and expertise, and stature.

Begin:
We recognize our roles as funders, employers, economic entities and community members. Through each of these roles, we use the wide range of assets held by philanthropy to create positive benefits and impact with our communities.

Aspire:
We use all of our assets to build equity and strengthen communities, as defined by the communities, themselves. We use all available tools such as values-based investing, impact investing and giving beyond any minimum requirements, to generate community benefits.

3. Values

Understand:
Having clear and transparent goals, missions and values allows us to be purposeful in philanthropy and facilitates accountability with communities and stakeholders.

Begin:
Our missions and goals are clearly stated and are transparent to the community. We hold ourselves accountable to them. We periodically examine our missions and goals for relevance, impact and alignment to our values.

Aspire:
We seek to understand and incorporate the values of our stakeholders and the communities we serve into our missions, values and goals. The community participates in examining our mission, values and goals for relevance, and holds us accountable to them.

4. Equity & Justice

Understand:
We recognize two truths. Philanthropy is created to promote the welfare of others. Our commitment to equity requires us to dismantle disparities in access to power, money and resources. At the same time, philanthropy is a system that is built on historical structural inequities and systemic racism. These inequities create a resource gap and power differential between philanthropy and the community.

Begin:
We are in a unique position to promote equity and justice. We seek to understand how intersectional inequities and racism manifest in our philanthropy and our communities. We work to become anti-racist individuals and organizations. In order to advance equity and justice, we listen to the community, honor their story and rely on their lived experience to inform our grantmaking.

Aspire:
We acknowledge our privilege in resources and resulting power. We commit to increase power sharing with our community, especially with communities that have been historically marginalized. We believe in trust and shared power in decision-making, which increases community access to philanthropic resources. This increases equity and makes progress toward dismantling racism and eliminating systemic inequities.

5. Community Engagement

Understand:
Philanthropy works best when it builds long-term community relationships rather than focusing on short-term transactions. Positive impacts increase when we hold mutually respectful, direct relationships with the community. As a result of community engagement, philanthropic efforts become more relevant and donors/grantors more accountable to our community.

Begin:
We listen to the desires of the community and we interact with the community in culturally appropriate, meaningful and respectful ways. We engage in continual and reciprocal listening and learning, cultural curiosity and humility. In our relationships, we respect the community’s time and resources and strive to give more than we receive.

Aspire:
We take time to understand our relationships with the community, align our aspirations and actions, and adjust our work, as needed. We solicit community critique and feedback. We strengthen our grantmaking through power sharing, joint decision-making and funding of solutions defined and led by the community.

6. Public Voice

Understand:
Philanthropic organizations and individual donors enjoy power and influence that we must use responsibly, both individually and collectively, for the greater good. Our public voice augments our grantmaking to demonstrate partnership in communities and to advance our goals.

Begin:
We form our public voice by listening humbly to those with lived experience on issues we seek to influence. We use our collective voice to share knowledge, educate ourselves and others, and impact change on issues that advance equity and strengthen our community.

Aspire:
We amplify the voice of communities that have been historically marginalized. We use our collective voice to impact change in public policy and public opinion on issues important to our communities. We use our resources to amplify community voices and support grassroots organizing and advocacy.

7. Continuous Learning

Understand:
We have unprecedented access to information from local and global sources including science, research and community networks. Our communities offer rich information about the human impact of policies and resource distribution. We are obligated to use various information sources to actively learn and strengthen our practice and allow for vulnerability and openness to the evolution of our work.

Begin:
We are curious about our work and engage in activities that help us to consider new viewpoints and address individual biases. Through a range of learning activities including research, self-assessment, evaluation, professional development and community engagement processes we seek and use information that improves our grantmaking and expands our understanding of the community.

Aspire:
With the community, we engage in ongoing learning and jointly define funding priorities. We respect many cultural ways of learning and knowing and work to achieve individual and organizational cultural competency. We promote continuous learning with our teams and alongside our grantee partners. We improve our work by offering and using peer feedback and being open and vulnerable in the process.

8. Transparency & Accountability

Understand:
Transparency builds trust and strengthens our accountability to the community. By being transparent, we are accountable to our mission, values and goals.

Begin:
We exhibit transparency by being clear, consistent and timely in our communications, decisions and commitments. We share information publicly in order to meet regulatory requirements and uphold community expectations, in the context of our missions. We demonstrate accountability by learning from community feedback and critique.

Aspire:
We consider state and federal regulatory requirements to be the minimum standard of transparency. We excel at transparency and accountability by engaging the community in decision-making and external evaluation of our work

The Foundation Legal Help Desk is designed to provide community, private and family foundations with access to answers to legal questions related to the operations of a foundation. The foundation world is a complex field that requires specialized legal knowledge and many foundations do not have easy access to an attorney with expertise in this field. The Help Desk is operated by our colleagues at the Indiana Philanthropy Alliance (IPA).

How Does it Work?
The service operates through a website. Participants log in with a username and password and type in their question. The software will send it to the attorney “on-call” for their topic area. The attorney will respond either with a written answer or will make arrangements for a phone conversation.

The attorneys providing this service have specialized knowledge in grantmaking, scholarships, fund management, planned giving, nonprofit law, the Pension Protection Act, UPMIFA and other laws that specifically affect the operations of a foundation. 

The Details

• This service is designed to provide quick answers to questions and is limited to a maximum of one hour on any one question. The attorney will be able to advise the foundation if they need to engage counsel to assist them with a complex legal issue or gift. 
• The attorney will engage directly with foundation staff or board members, and will not work directly with donors or professional advisors. 
• The attorney can review documents but will not prepare any documents.
• This service is for legal questions that relate to the operation of a foundation, not legal issues facing a foundation’s grantees. 

Foundations will contact IPA directly to subscribe to the service, and IPA will provide them with a subscription agreement. Once they send the agreement back to IPA with their payment, IPA will provide them with their login credentials. IPA will let you know when any of your members sign up for the service, and will provide each PSO with an annual report on usage by your members and the topic areas of questions handled. 

Service Levels and Costs

How to Subscribe
Email [email protected] to request a registration form and subscription agreement. Please indicate that you are a CNJG member.

These resources are from CNJG's 2016 Annual Meeting & Holiday Luncheon where the topic of shifting demographics was explored. Research by the Pew Research Center shows that New Jersey, and the nation, is experiencing the most striking social, racial, economic, and demographic shifts that have not been seen in more than a century. Funders will need to address the new challenges this “next America” will face, including an increasing aging population, greater racial tapestry, the influence of religion and technology, and more.