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The Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN) and Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders (SAFSF) invite you to join an informal conversation to learn from funder peers who are practicing participatory grantmaking (PG). We’ll begin with a brief overview of PG, and how this practice can be used to center equity and justice as we shift away from extractive grantmaking practices. We’ll then hear from a few HEFN and SAFSF members who are implementing different models of PG in their grantmaking.
If you’re new to the concept of participatory grantmaking, this webinar is a great opportunity to see examples of it in action. If you’re familiar with participatory grantmaking (or working to implement these practices in your own world), this is a chance to dive deeper into others’ practices for learnings and insight. Time will be reserved in the agenda for discussions in smaller groups and, as you might expect, the call will be participatory!
Speakers:
Amanda Tello, St. Louis Environmental Justice Fund
Shavaun Evans, Food and Farm Communications Fund
Mark Muller, Regenerative Agriculture Foundation
Resources
Zoom Recording
Webinar slides
Deciding Together Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking
Amanda Tello’s communal agreements
PG Learning Community Summary
The Morris County Funders Group, a coalition of 10 grantmaking organizations, pooled $325,000 to support mental health in the region. With funding from this newly formed collaboration, the Mental Health Association in New Jersey (MHANJ) will facilitate mental health first aid training for up to 45 Morris County organizations. This first initiative of the funders group aims to address the growing mental health crisis in young people and adults.
Supporters of this initiative include the Community Foundation of New Jersey, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Hyde and Watson Foundation, Somerset Hills Community Health Foundation, Fannie E. Rippel Foundation, Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, Six Talents Foundation, F. M. Kirby Foundation, MCJ Amelior Foundation, and the Mimi Washington Starrett Foundation.
Moderated by Justin Kiczek, F. M. Kirby Foundation, you’ll hear from panelists Bernie Moriarty, Hyde & Watson Foundation and Aaron Turner, Community Foundation of New Jersey, Bob Kley from MHANJ and a partner nonprofit. The panel will share how the funders came together to support this important and urgent issue, and how they worked in collaboration with MHANJ. Following the panel discussion, participants will have time for Q & A.
Webinar Video
Resources
Mental Health Association in New Jersey
Jersey Gives a Damn Podcast
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.
Food is essential. But how often do you consider where your food comes from?This issue of What Funders Need to Know from the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers explores the stages of the food system, from production all the way to disposal. Why is this important to philanthropy?
Because hunger, food insecurity, nutrition-related chronic disease, the health of resource lands and waterways, wages, and equal opportunity in the food economy all converge in our regional food system.
Shifting Power to Shift Systems: Insights and Tools for Funders is a new report from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) that summarizes insights relating to power dynamics from leaders and experts on driving systems change.
Over the course of three months in early 2022, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ Shifting Systems Initiative hosted a series of eight workshops focused on power and equity in philanthropy. During these workshops, an invited group of funders and other partners discussed the role of power dynamics in effectuating the systems change needed to address increasingly complex global challenges. The honest and rich conversations during those workshops surfaced several important themes and insights on how to balance power in a way that drives rather than inhibits change. RPA’s new report, Shifting Power to Shift Systems: Insights and Tools for Funders, distills some of the practical actions that funders can take in order to reduce that power imbalance.
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors has released The Philanthropy Framework, a tool for analysis and planning to guide emerging and established philanthropies to better align resources for maximum impact. Created with input from leaders from more than 50 foundations worldwide, the tool seeks to address fundamental changes in philanthropy and the world such as generational shifts in attitudes, massive wealth creation, diversity of capital, new models for impact, and new operating environments among others.
It lays out three core elements for philanthropists to consider when determining how to maximize their impact:
- Charter, the organization’s scope, form of governance, and decision-making protocol
- Social Compact, its implicit or explicit agreement with society about the value it will create
- Operating Model, the approach to the resources, structures and systems needed to implement strategy.
As artificial intelligence (AI) and technological advances take on an increasingly prominent role in our society, BIPOC and immigrant communities face the threat of biases and outright hostilities being encoded and automated into surveillance, enforcement, and judicial tools. At the same time, creative leaders in the nonprofit sector are leveraging and building new technologies to better deliver culturally responsive services at scale to their communities. In this two-part series on the intersection of AI, technology and immigrant justice, GCIR invites funders to deepen their knowledge in the space as well as gain insights on how philanthropy can deploy investments that build the movement’s capacity to respond to emergent threats and opportunities.
Part 1: The Threat of AI and Technology to Immigrant Justice
As technological innovation accelerates, so too do its potential harms, particularly for immigrant communities. AI and tech tools are increasingly being weaponized in surveillance, enforcement, detention, and court system contexts. Troubling examples of this include DHS’s use of tools to automate decision making on credibility determinations, benefit eligibility, and whether or not individuals should be released from detention. AI and technology tools are also being used to spread mis- and disinformation, not only endangering immigrant communities, but also weakening our ability to function as a society with a shared set of information about the world. In this discussion, funders will learn from immigrant and civil liberties groups at the forefront of the movement to mitigate technologically-driven harms to historically targeted communities.
Speakers:
Tsion Gurmu, Legal Director, Black Alliance for Just Immigration
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, Managing Director, Liberty & National Security, Brennan Center for Justice
Paromita Shah, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Just Futures Law
Cinthya Rodriguez, National Organizer, Mijente
Registration is also open for for the second part of the series, "Tech for Good: Building Innovative Tools to Serve Immigrant Communities," taking place on Thursday, February 13th. Click here to register.
From February 26-28, 2023, members of the NLC’s Mayoral Network on Community Safety and Violence Prevention, city representatives and resource guests were welcomed by Mayor Ras J. Baraka in Newark, New Jersey. Attendees saw firsthand the strides made by Mayor Baraka, Office of Violence Prevention & Trauma Recovery Director Lakeesha Eure, and the rest of the Newark team. Alongside community partners, the city team members are advancing new safety strategies alongside longstanding ones. This collaborative, people-centered approach to addressing violence and promoting safety led to 60-year lows in homicides for the city.
The philanthropic community in Newark is an instrumental part of the city’s transformation of its public safety ecosystem over the past nine years. Several local foundations supported the development and implementation of a new public health centered strategy from its infancy by providing the resources for two public safety retreats, multiple community-based violence prevention and interruption organizations, new data tools and collaboratives, and trauma training for community and police.
Lisa Block, Senior Program Officer with the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, shared her thoughts on the work in this article for Grantmakers in Health.
Narratives shape policy, sway elections, and determine whose voices are heard or silenced. Media is not just a communication tool: it is civic infrastructure, as essential to democracy as roads and schools. Yet the systems that shape our shared understanding are collapsing, consolidating, or being strategically captured.
This four part Media Learning Series designed in partnership with Independence Public Media Foundation is for funders who recognize that the fight for justice, equity, and democracy is also a fight over the stories we tell, and who gets to tell them. Through four dynamic sessions, we’ll explore how media and narrative power underpin every funder’s work, regardless of sector. Participants will move from conceptual understanding to actionable strategies for funding community-driven media and narrative ecosystems that can endure and adapt over time.
Across the series, you will:
Understand how today’s media systems shape public imagination, democracy, and movement building and why current funding approaches often fall short.
See how community led narrative work fuels organizing, shifts policy, and builds long-term power.
Learn how to assess and invest in the media and information needs of the communities you serve.
Leave with concrete steps, peer connections, and tools to begin or deepen your media funding practice.
SESSION LISTINGS:
Session 1 – Wednesday, 10/8, 12-1 PM via Zoom
Who Tells the Story?: Media, Power, and Philanthropy’s Role in Shaping the Narrative
Session 2 – Wednesday, 10/22, 12-1 PM via Zoom
How Narrative Fuels Organizing, Movement-Building, and Policy Change
Session 3 – Wednesday, 11/5, 12-1 PM via Zoom
Building Community Information Power from the Ground Up
Session 4 – Wednesday, 11/19, 12-2 PM In-person (location TBD)
Taking Action, Learning, and Adjusting: Building a Media Funding Practice that Lasts
We encourage you to attend the entire series, as each series will build on the last. However, we welcome you however you can show up. Recordings and resources will be available after each meeting. The stakes are high and the moment to act is now. Funders who engage today can help ensure that tomorrow’s media landscape reflects the full diversity, truth, and resilience of our communities.
Presented by Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia
For 20 years, The Nicholson Foundation worked to advance meaningful change in safety net service systems in New Jersey. Its grantmaking journey is described in Changing Systems, Changing Lives: Reflecting on 20 Years. Through stories and related text, the book showed how a small family foundation could take six guiding themes and put them into action through grants and partner support. In the process, the Foundation collaborated to spur real systems change that benefitted individuals, families, and communities. A recent scholarly paper built on that work, helping to make the Foundation’s approach broadly accessible to researchers, academics, and philanthropists. “A Framework for Creating Systems Change,” by Drs. William Brown and Wynn Rosser published in The Foundation Review, presents a new model for systems change. Five of the model’s seven components reflect themes in Changing Systems, Changing Lives. The sixth component slightly shifts the emphasis of the Foundation’s “Engaging with Government” theme, and the seventh highlights the Foundation’s overall approach by including performance measurement as a distinct and separate component of the model.
Download or order a free hard copy of The Nicholson Foundation book, "Changing Systems, Changing Lives"
Read Brown W, Rosser W. "A Framework for Creating Systems Change". The Foundation Review, 2023;15(4):50-6.