Funding Family Programs: The Grantmakers' Perspective
Katherine Diaz, Open Society Institute (Soros Foundations Network); Lorin Harris, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation; Benita Kornegay-Henry, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation; and Renette Oklewicz, Freddie Mac Foundation.
Tuesday, September 15, 1998, 4:15 - 5:30 PM, Auditorium, Edwin Hostetter: Moderator
Ed Hostetter
This is Loren Harris, Benita Kornegay-Henry to his right, at the end is Renette Oklewicz, and then at the near end is Kathryn Diaz. Actually, why don’t each of you, when you make your presentation tell however much more you want us to know about yourselves and your organizations. Okay? Thanks.
Harris
Good afternoon. First of all I’d like to thank Family and Corrections Network for inviting me here and for giving me an opportunity to sort of share some of the foundation’s thinking around supporting families in general and then specifically looking at the impact of parental incarceration on families and communities, um and with particular concern for its impact on children. We would like to thank those of you who are practitioners and researchers in the field for joining us this afternoon and would be more than interested in hearing your afterthoughts post our presentations this afternoon and hearing from the field of folks who work on these issues everyday on how foundations can be a partner to you and of help to you as you move forward pushing your agendas.
Some real quick background information on the C.S. Mott Foundation. It was founded in 1926 by Charles Stewart Mott. The assets for the foundation came from GM stock. Its office is in Flint, Michigan, although we do funding both nationally, internationally and domestically. .
We fund broadly in four areas: civil society - is our international grant making issue area. Domestically we fund around three issues. We fund in the city of Flint. We fund anti-poverty strategies. Finally, we fund issues around environmental safety and improving a number of environmental outcomes. Our anti-poverty strategies have the following four focuses: we really focus on building communities, and we use two basic strategies there. One has to do with community organizing and issue organizing, we focus on strengthening families, which I’ll come back to in a moment, and improving education.
Some of you may be aware of the foundation’s recent partnership with the Department of Education and the 21st century Schools Initiative and finally expanding economic opportunity. The Strengthening Families Initiative really focuses on about five specific areas and that’s the portfolio which I’m responsible for at the foundation.
We focus on the following five, again under the grouping of anti-poverty. We really look at the social impact of what’s happening economically on low income families. We look at what strategies are successful in the field that looked at building the capacity of parents. We’re very interested in how we re-engage fathers and successful strategies for re-engaging fathers responsibly and helping them to develop healthy relationships with their children. We’re looking at the impacts of work on family and how you can connect both parents to work and then finally we looked at demonstrations projects, investing in demonstration projects that have either already been evaluated or will include some form of evaluation in them, and with elements of those demonstration projects that are replicable.
Now I’d like to discuss the general grant-making guidelines for the foundation and how you might put together your application. We encourage folks to first have some conversation some dialogue, with the program officer at the foundation. Put together a letter of inquiry regarding the project that you’d eventually like the foundation to consider for funding, with some explanation of need in that letter of inquiry, of course some direct reference to the description of the project, the target population, what the amount of the request is, methodology and so on and so forth and to wrap up with some summary of your institutional budget and some appendices around your organizations tax status and highlighting key staff qualifications.
But, I think anytime you sort of begin to identify the private dollar and work on pulling into your organization support from foundations it’s also important to identify where those dollars can be complemented by public funds. I have listed some of the opportunities that may be available to you to support your current efforts with public dollars as well. Those would include welfare to work dollars.
I’ve identified the seventy percent formula dollars that have been allocated to states, and I think that all but six states at this point have submitted applications to the Department of Labor for those funds. I do know that thirty nine state plans have been approved by the Department of Labor at this juncture. A number of states have given authorization or submitted plans that would allow them to use those dollars on non-custodial fathers if that’s a focus of your program. So those dollars are available. There’s of course a two to one state match with federal dollars on formula funds but there’s also a twenty five percent, I’m sorry - I should back up a bit, of the Welfare to Work dollars there are three billion dollars available. That’s split on the three billion dollars, seventy five percent of it will be dedicated to states in the form of block grants on a formula basis, based on their welfare populations prior to the ... twenty five percent of that three billion will be dedicated to competitive grants for which picks are available and state governments are eligible to apply and qualify for.
There’s no match required for the competitive dollars and they can be used for a various number of purposes but they can also be used on non-custodial fathers, but must be used on work related activity or actually putting people to work . For example, the creation of public service jobs is an option for using the twenty five percent competitive dollars. The eligibility requirements and the target population, and I’ll get to something a little later on that I think sort of substantiates that this target population that you’ll possibly serve and meets these criteria. Seventy percent has to be spent on the most hard to employ and thirty percent on any other tenant of the population including non-custodial fathers, again this is of the twenty five percent competitive grants.
Another source of public funds would be state TANF surpluses and access and visitation grants. Another here that’s not listed are your title twenty dollars are also another source of public funding that you could possibly use to support your current efforts in addition to private dollars.
Really quickly I wanted to get into why the foundation thinks this issue of supporting fathers and families broadly is important and then talk a bit about some of the data that we sort of rely on heavily to substantiate our grant making parties around this issue. Again, as I mentioned earlier, our focus is on low-income families. We are critically concerned about two parent investment in child well-being and child-rearing. So, the idea that fathers, the extent to which we can have fathers engage responsibly both economically and emotionally in the well-being of their children. We are interested in strategies which do that. We are interested in building the capacity of both parents to rear healthy children who are developmentally sound and healthy and happy. We are interested in decreasing the risks of family instability.
We know that in at-risk communities you have a number of instability factors that range from high crime rates to high poverty rates and where you have family instability we believe you also have at-risk communities and in a larger sense at risk societies. We are also concerned about the prevalence of young single parent families and we know from the research that those families are a greater risk and the children more importantly in those families are at greater risk. Some of the research that’s gone forward suggests that children do best in families where you have two biological parents raising them and it’s not suggesting single parent families do not do well. Many of them do very well and we know that. But we are talking about what are some of the best situations for child-rearing. Where you do not have (as is prevalent in low income communities) two parents that are married, two biological parents that are married, we are looking at strategies that encourage concept like team parenting where the two parents work together in the best interest of their child, even where marriage has been absent.
Finally, we want to look at addressing public policy and systems that often undermine family stability and often work adversely against father engagement, and adversely against parental stability and parental involvement.
Quickly, I want to profile the stability, the select demographic of low-income families and I guess you could sort of slice this up into several thirds or of several fourths or fifths and talk about working poor families and non-working poor families and benefit receiving families and so on and so forth. But, in general terms, the families we’re concerned with are low-income never married parents and they actually share very similar demographics. I’ll highlight that very quickly a little later on. We know that the mothers and the fathers tend to be young, low-income, poorly educated, have very little work experience. Many low-income fathers lack the economic stability to pay child-support and to really provide the economic supportive role that is often expected of them in society. Most low-income mothers do not receive child support and so your sort of have a correlative relationship between dads who are unable to pay and low-income moms who are receiving no child-support in the first place. The data strongly suggests that these moms and dads are very closely associated. I’ll touch on that briefly now.
This is a comparison of those moms and dads. As you can see, of the moms who do not receive any child support, and of the dads who do not pay any, they are very close data that’s there’s some assortative mating to use a sociologists term occurring between the dads and the moms. As you can see, only forty four percent of low income moms receive some child support. About forty-six percent of low income dads pay some support. The other numbers sort of bear out low-income dads who are low-income. About twenty-three percent are below poverty, about twenty-five percent of them receive child support. Again, you can see the relationship between the moms and the dads and that these two populations are quite similar. In terms of age and race, again, the populations are very similar. Educationally very similar population and also in terms of race. I think this is the most subjective because you have of course cross racial mating and interface.
Why we are concerned with what happens with incarcerated fathers and families is because we fundamentally discern that it’s the same population. That when you look at the profile of low-income non-custodial fathers that are in communities, it’s very similar profile to that of incarcerated fathers. This sort of highlights that similarity and gives a quick comparison. The median age of low-income fathers in communities is between twenty and thirty. Nearly half are high school drop outs, most earn less than ten thousand dollars, according to 1990 census data, most are not currently and have never been married, most of them are minorities. Similarly with fathers with criminal justice contact or who are currently under the supervision of the criminal justice system, most of them are in their mid twenties to mid thirties, many are high school drop outs, in fact, two thirds are high school drop outs and most earn less than ten thousand dollars according to the 1991 inmates survey. Again, most have never been married, I think only a quarter or less. And again, most again are minorities, approximately seventy percent of the current incarcerated population are minority men.
Really quickly, once you sort of get below the surface and start dealing with these dads these are some of the litany of issues that you’ll be facing and attempting to address, as I’m sure many of you have already began to do in your direct service programs. This is sort of the dynamic of what is happening in communities. These guys are sort of cycling into institutions and cycling back into communities. Part of the problem is that you don’t have services in communities to meet this guy so when he comes back home he’s sort of scratching his head trying to figure out what in the world should be going on and how he can reintegrate back into his community and to his family and on the other hand he’s at the mercy of the criminal justice system when and if he does come in contact with it again.
These are quickly some of the issues that are not a part of the solution as we see it. Public policy and practice often inadequately responds to the needs of low income families, insufficient data on incarcerated parents and their children, lack of constructive skill building activities while these folks are incarcerated and post incarceration, community and faith based organizations who are serving these families really lack capacity staff wise and the resources to provide a menu of comprehensive services and finally family and community reintegration is seemingly nobody’s job.
Finally new opportunities and strategies to begin addressing some of the issues that are seemingly not being addressed. We need to develop public policies that strengthen and support low income fathers and families. You see some distinction between fathers and families because our public policies have all but neglected the needs of fathers as if though they’ve been non-existent. We need to really focus on improving state and local data collections systems so that we get better data and have a realistic picture and up to date picture of what’s happening with these fathers and their children, and the impact of their incarceration on communities. We need to increase the investigation of the impacts of parental incarceration on children and families, grow department of corrections and/or civil led skill development activities or initiatives that exist in prisons . I see Garry Mendez here who does fantastic work and others of you whom I’m familiar with who do fantastic work in trying to develop skill-building activity for inmates who are incarcerated. Those efforts need to be supported and grown in a broader sense. Finally we need to build an infrastructure in the field that supports your efforts much like FCN does and to increase practitioner capacity to provide services in a comprehensive fashion to fathers and families and communities. Thank you very much and have a good day.
Inaudible question from audience
Harris
I didn’t have that on slide but I can give it to you - it’s www.mott.org. I’m sorry, I’m remiss, I did not bring materials, however they are being updated as we are in the process of reconfiguring our funding priorities and grant making strategies.
Hostetter
Thank you very much Loren Harris from the Mott Foundation. For those of you who came in after we started, there will be a general period of question and answer after all four presenters have spoken. Next is Benita Kornegay-Henry from the Meyer Foundation.
Kornegay-Henry
Yes - Good afternoon everyone. I’m happy to be here from the Meyer Foundation and I would just like to know if you wouldn’t mind giving me a show of hands, how many of you are from the local metropolitan area community please? Okay, thank you. I will try to target my remarks to both. Meyer is a local metropolitan area funder but I hope that what I will have to say in terms of what makes a competitive proposal will be beneficial to all of you, no matter what foundation you are applying to. Just to let you know, some of you are from the local area and you may not know that the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation was started by the family who owns the Washington Post. Eugene Meyer bought the Post in 1933 when it was near bankruptcy and he endowed the foundation with four million dollars in stock and today they are worth over one hundred million dollars. I often with I had the foundations investment advisors, because I guess I could be rich. So, we’ll see.
The foundation gives money based on the interest that is earned on that principal. As I said, over a hundred million dollars. So this year, we have about six million dollars to give away. As I said, most of our funding is in the metropolitan area, most of it goes to D.C., but we do fund in some parts of Maryland and Virginia.
I will tell you that I did bring some annual reports and they’re back on the table behind me if you all want to know what we fund and what we do not fund since some of you are not from the local area it might not be as beneficial for me to go through that whole litany of what we fund and don’t fund but if you want that information it’s on the back table for you.
I guess I will just go into what I think makes a competitive proposal because I think that will be the most beneficial part of my remarks, so let me just skip forward to that. The first thing that I say to people when they’re approaching a foundation is that they need to do as much research as possible before they submit a proposal and before they contact the foundation via letter or telephone call. In the local are we have an organization called the Foundation Center. I know that there are Foundation Centers around the country, I don’t know if there are any in your area, but I’m sure that there must be some technical assistance associations that you might call about how to shape a proposal, how to get the foundation’s guidelines, etc. etc. So that when you do get a call, or when you do send a proposal it is as competitive as possible.
You might also, want to call the foundation, just call the receptionist and see whether or not they have an annual report or some other information that they would be willing to share with you because you can look at that and then before you make your call or write your proposal you will be armed with that information and therefore hopefully be more competitive. I also ask people to read the foundations grants list. Sometimes you can get a sense of what the foundation is interested in just by reading the list of grantees and the programs that have been funded and that way you can get a sense of how you might target your proposal to be competitive at the foundation board table.
If a foundation allows it, you might also want to call the program officer at the foundation. At my foundation there are three and a half of us, and other foundations might have one, but if it’s allowed I think it’s beneficial to call the program officer and see whether or not you can run your idea by the foundation program officer Often we’ll answer questions or raise questions that you might answer in a full proposal or it might lead you to do some more ground work before you submit a proposal.
I also say when you submit a proposal it’s nice to have the statistics and I think it’s very important but since most foundation board members cannot go to visit you at your site, and see some of the clients that you’re working with, it’s useful to have a case study or a little vignette in the proposal so that the foundation’s staff and board can get a personal sense of how you’re impacting your clients, so that you kind of take it out of the realm of statistics and put it on the ground where people are and just give them a chance to see how useful your program is.
In the proposal you should, if you can, include letters of support from some of the clients that you’re serving. As well as some of the agencies who might also be working with the same population of clients that you’re working with. At least at the Meyer foundation, and I’m sure it may be true for others, we like to see that there is a network of providers serving a similar population if that is true, and that that network of providers know each other, are working with each other, and are providing complementary services. So, if you have a proposal and there’s another organization that also serves the same population and is willing to write you a letter of support we feel that that’s much more competitive than an agency that might be serving a same target population but no other agency in the community knows them. That is not as compelling. So, we always say a letter of support if you can promise it.
Also, don’t over-promise. I’m sure all of us have seen proposals where a group will promise to end homelessness, or end violence. While we wish that this were so, it probably won’t happen over a one or two year grant period and so we really do prefer, you know just give us some manageable expectations and outcomes so that we really know what to expect at the end of the year, so that both the foundation and you can be proud of what has happened over the course of the grant period..
Also, if you know someone at the foundation, if you know someone on the foundation’s board, if you know another foundation staff member who has supported your work and is willing to call the foundation to which you are applying to offer a few words on your behalf I think that’s very important. If it’s a board member, just ask the board member how they want to handle that contact. At Meyer, some board members will just call the program staff and say, hey look, I got a call from so and so, could you really just check into it. That gives us a heads up to go the distance in terms of making sure that we’ve fully reviewed your proposal and we will try to work with you to make it competitive if we can. If you know another foundation staff person and that person calls and says hey look, you should really take a look at this proposal, we will do that. You have to understand we get like two hundred proposals per grant round and so, you know, as much contact as you can have with the foundation program officer before we look at the proposal is important.
I guess I will, I don’t know if all foundations do site visits, Meyer does, if you get a site visit, that’s really a show that the foundation is interested in your organization. Please make sure that there is some activity going on when the foundation staff person comes. I just really can’t emphasize that enough. We had an instance where a woman was providing a child care program and when we got there, there were no children, and that just made us feel as though nothing was going on, and sometimes that happens because it’s the summer or it’s the kids’ day off, but when a foundation program staff officer comes they really want to see the program in action, and so please make sure that you negotiate a day where there’s some activity.
I think that’s all I have concerning that but I’d be happy to entertain questions if you have any later on. Thank you.
Hostetter
Thank you very much. Next we have Renette Oklewicz from the Freddie Mac foundation.
Oklewicz
Thanks Ed. I am very glad to be here representing the Freddie Mac Foundation. I agree with just about everything that’s been said by the previous two funders and I will try not to be repetitive. Freddie Mac is a corporate foundation and one of the things I would be remiss if I did not do is explain how that’s a little different from the three private family foundations that are represented here. I will do that near the end of my presentation.
The Freddie Mac foundation is a corporate foundation. Freddie Mac is a secondary mortgage market lender. We provide financing so that every American when they go to the bank to say that they would like a mortgage on their home the bank doesn’t say, well sorry, we just gave out our last loan, come back next month. We were set up by Congress, we’re chartered by Congress, we’re a government sponsored enterprise. We are publicly held corporation. We became publicly held in 1989 and our stock has done very well if anybody is interested in investing in it. Many of you may not have heard of Freddie Mac but you probably have heard of Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae has been around much longer than we have. They were started in the 50’s we were started in 1972. We do the same thing. You’re probably, if you own a home, your mortgage is either owned by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. There are many other smaller secondary mortgage market lenders in the business, but primarily the two of us own most of the mortgages.
Freddie Mac decided in 1991, after they became publicly held, that they could establish a foundation, our CEO decided that we would focus on disadvantaged children and families. Most corporations will focus on what their corporate mission is. For instance, Fannie Mae focuses on housing. so Leland went to our board and said that’s what we do as a business, we provide housing and if we do that well, we shouldn’t be doing it in our philanthropy, but what we need to do in our philanthropy is to assure that the families who live in that housing have their needs met. That they’re strong and that their children are healthy and happy and can grow up in safe and nurturing communities. So we think it’s a great complement. What we do as a foundation to what the corporation does. That is not often the case. In a corporate foundation, as I said, generally the corporate foundation is looking to support, Johnson & Johnson; something in the health care field, or early child health and maternal child health, so as you’re looking for funding this might be tough in your industry, what you all do but you might want to search out those foundations who might have a common interest with what you do. It’s going to be, I think, a little bit tricky, knowing the population that you serve, but I think researching as Benita has suggested will serve you well.
Freddie Mac, as I was saying was established in 1991. We are seven years old. In the last seven years we have given away about fifty million dollars. This year we’re giving away eleven million dollars, the majority of which will go to organizations here in the Washington D.C. area. We also fund the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. We fund statewide initiatives in Maryland and statewide initiatives in Virginia. We also fund national initiatives. That would be an organization that is providing a service, program, project, whatever it is they’re doing, that impacts the entire country. For instance, I made a national grant to the Parents Anonymous national organization located in California. But it was to help strengthen their chapter network, to provide leadership training for the mothers and fathers who were in their Parents Anonymous programs and in generally to strengthen the capacity of that organization to do the work that it does. That impacted the whole country, we would not fund for instance, a Parents Anonymous chapter located directly in Los Angeles. So, you will see in our annual report that there are national organizations that are funded, and they may be some of you in this room who work for national organizations, and you should consider picking up our information which is also on the back table, it looks like this. It’s a packet that has everything in it you could possibly need.
The annual report has our guidelines, our grant making guidelines, our deadlines, and an explanation of all the different kinds of programs that we fund. I’ll give you a brief overview, like Benita, you can read this and learn as much as you need to know. We are also on the web, www.freddiemacfoundation.org, pretty simple. All of the information in this packet is also on the website but please take a packet or two if you’d like.
The foundation funds four key program areas, one is education, one is advocacy, one is foster care and adoption, and one is strengthening families, which is my program area. All of those program areas look at strengthening communities, strengthening families, early intervention, prevention, with the exception of foster care and adoption, which is way at the other end of the spectrum. We just added foster care and adoption this year as a major program area, it doesn’t get as much funding as the other two key ones; which are strengthening families and education but we do try to look at impacting children and their families early in life, as early as possible. Rather than trying to re-mediate and treat and intervene on problems.
It is important that your organization, in whatever you’re going to approach us, can think about how you can strengthen families early on in that family life, in that child’s life. I will tell you that in the last seven years, I don’t think we have made one grant to an organization that is working with an incarcerated population. That’s kind of surprising but no one has come to us with any programs like that. I’d be real interested in hearing from some of you if you have some effective programs that you can demonstrate are delivering some valuable outcomes.
A couple of tips, if you want to know more about what we fund, how we fund, and how we do it, it really is in the packet. Everything Benita’s said about site visits, reviewing grants, whatever, it’s all the same, we do the same thing. What we look for in organizations however, I don’t think Benita was able to point out, because of the time constraints, I think probably everyone here will agree with me, you can learn a lot when you get declined, and you call and say why did you decline me. I always try to be very honest, and sometimes it’s not real easy. But I invest when I make a grant in the leadership of the organization, the vision, the energy, the enthusiasm of that executive director, the quality of staff, the people he or she has gathered around her, the collaborators they’ve pulled together in the community, high quality other organizations with the same kind of vision and commitment to problems, organizations that are able to demonstrate outcomes is real important these days. You’re probably hearing this if you’re going out and looking for grants. Those organizations that can demonstrate that they have memorable results are much more likely to get a grant from the Freddie Mac foundation than those who are simply out there doing good stuff and just want us to give them money because it’s good work they’re doing.
Everybody’s doing good work, but we have such a little bit of money to give away, ten million dollars for the problems in this community is almost insignificant. What we do invest in our grantees we want to be sure that they have some real valuable outcomes. In the packet of information that I’ve given you there is a description of what we expect you to give us, which are goals, objectives, activities and outcomes. How you are going to measure those. It’s pretty simple stuff. We’re not asking for any Harvard-led kind of evaluation here. We generally don’t fund big evaluations, but we do think you ought to examine what you do and decide, okay if we say we are going to improve parenting skills, how are you going to know that. How are you going to know that the program you delivered to those parents was effective. Was it enough? Maybe you should have done more classes, maybe you should have done less. Those are the kind of questions we hope organizations will look at that outline we’ve given in our guidelines and begin to question their work.
What I have found since we’ve started doing this several years ago is that organizations at first kind of look at me and probably want to kill me when I tell them what they need to do. But, once they’ve gone through that exercise, they’ll say it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. I’ll never forget one executive director said, "you know, I got my staff around the table and I said we’ve got to do this. We’ve got to figure out what our goals are and how we’re going to get there? How are we going to know we got there when we did, and what did we do right and what didn’t we do right?" She said we got around that table and nobody could agree on anything and until that time "I had no idea that we all had a different opinion of what we were supposed to be doing and what our outcomes were supposed to be and how we were supposed to get there."
For that organization, and I think for a lot of others, it was a real defining moment. So, it is real important no matter who you approach that you’re able to define what your outcomes are going to be and what your results are going to be. I’ll say that much about goals, objectives and outcomes.
Secondly, in terms of your organizational effectiveness, we look at how strong your board of directors is. Do you have community leaders, do you have corporate CEO’s or corporate folks on your board? Are they involved, do they provide funding for your organization? That’s real important. It goes along with that executive director being very visionary and committed. We look at the financial stability of the organization. Look at who your collaborators are. Do you have a strategic plan? Do you know where you’re going? Do you know what you’re all about? Or are you just out there doing all kinds of things all over the place? Those are, in terms of organizational effectiveness as a corporate foundation, we hear this all the time because we’re part of a corporation that depends on profitability and depends on the vision and the strategic plan and strong board members. So, that is very important to us and who we fund.
I also wanted to mention, I said I would talk to you about how you might approach a corporate foundation differently than you might approach a private or family foundation. A corporate foundation, or let’s say this a little more broadly a corporation, may not have a foundation. Most corporations do have a community giving program of some sorts. It may not be a ten million dollar foundation, but more and more and more corporations, businesses, small businesses, large, whatever they are in your communities are interested in becoming involved and providing resources to the community. You may look at your local bank and say, well they don’t have any money, they don’t have a foundation. But, they do have other resources that you might be able to solicit from them. Even from a large corporation like Freddie Mac.
We also provide volunteers. We have a huge volunteer base. Forty percent of our employees volunteer on a regular basis in corporate run activities and private community activities with organizations like yours. We encourage our officers and directors of the corporations to serve on boards of community organizations that we’re working with. We have computers and printers and furniture and sofas and all kinds of stuff that we give away all the time to organizations who might then turn that over to families or might go to a school or whatever.
And the other resource that I don’t think we often think about; community based organizations think about in terms of approaching a corporation; they may not have a lot of money, but they have a lot of skills and a lot of knowledge that can be very valuable to you. I find a lot of community based organizations need a lot of help with PR and marketing, strategic planning, all those things that make you a strong organization. Almost every corporation has skilled people, who that’s what they do for a business. That’s what their job is I should say. There are some businesses obviously, who do PR marketing.
Don’t forget that you can secure resources that may not meet the bottom line in terms of how much money you’re trying to raise. But you’re trying to develop a brochure. You’re trying to design a brochure, a very costly endeavor, maybe you can get someone from a local bank or company, whoever, to help you design that. That may be the resource they can provide for you. So, think broadly when you think about approaching a corporate foundation or a corporation or business in your community.
Just want to thank you all for being here. It’s my pleasure. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them when the panel’s completed.
Hostetter
Thank you. Now lastly before the Q & A period, will be Kathryn Diaz from the Open Society Institute.
Diaz
Thank you Ed. I am honored to be here today, and I appreciate your all waiting here till the end of the day to listen to us speak. I’m also thrilled to be with my colleagues here up on the panel. I’m new to the grant making area so I’ve learned quite a bit just this afternoon just listening to everyone else. I regret that my colleagues from the grant making department were not able to be here to present. I’m the librarian for the Center on Crime Communities and Cultures at the Open Society Institute. So, although I’m not in the grant making area, I hope that I will be able to represent my foundation well. And that you’ll be able to understand a little bit about what we do at the end of the talk.
The Center on Crime Communities and Cultures was established two years ago as a program run by the Open Society Institute, which is otherwise known as the Soros Foundation. The Soros Foundation is a network of foundations all over the world established by philanthropist billionaire, George Soros. You may have heard of him in the news today, I guess he’s up here in Washington presenting on the economy in Russia and Southeast Asia and how that’s effecting the US economy.
But, in any case, the Open Society Institute was established in order to create more open societies during a time when there were closed societies most readily apparent in Eastern Europe. The Center on Crime is one of the first programs established here in the United States. Prisons are a very obvious closed society and therefore it was evident early on that the Open Society Institute should get involved in the issues around crime and criminal justice. And that way we could create an open dialogue around such issues as crime, violence and prisons.
We have been doing funding of criminal justice programs since the inception of the center two years ago. Our strategy for funding and grant making has changed recently. Today, I brought copies of our guidelines which I have placed on the literature table in the back. But, we may have run out, so I’ll give you our website address in case you were unable to get a copy of the guidelines, which look like this. Our website address is www.soros.org/crime/
The primary focus of our grant making is to fund innovative programs that address issues of public safety. The areas that we fund are six. I’m not going to discuss them at length now because the information is in our brochure. And since I’m not that familiar with the grant making I would feel more comfortable if we discusses either one on one or by your telephoning the grant making department. But let me say, that if you are interested in seeking funding around prison family issues, it would appear to me that you should tally your proposal to priority area 1 which is defining and bridging the gap between victims, defendants and their families, priority area 2, which addresses prevention and post-release programs, and in some cases, priority area 3, which is finding new solutions to ...violence.
The major way to seek funding from the foundation is through the basic application process. Sending a request for funding, very basic eight page or so, typed application in I believe it is quadruplicate. But, specific areas that you should watch for as you’re writing your proposal are the following, besides the issues that have been addressed so far. It is important for you to keep in mind that the project should be sustainable over the long term. That is something that’s quite important as we develop our strategies and review proposals. We want to know that we’re funding something, a program, that will continue on once our support has been discontinued.. Therefore, in an effort to prove your sustainability it would certainly be helpful if we were to see in your proposal that you have approached other funders. Whether it’s the government, small local organization, other philanthropic foundations like our own. It would be very important to include that information.
We also need to know that you’ve done your homework insofar as you have read carefully the guidelines so that it is clear that you have approached us as the appropriate funding source or as an appropriate funding source. And, that we know your proposal fits in with the programs that we fund. At the same time, we want to know that you’re familiar with the Soros Foundation. That you understand our philosophy. The philosophy of the Center on Crime. That you understand we are a big foundation. It’s difficult to meet the needs of so many organizations that need funding where, in the area of criminal justice there aren’t that many dollars being put out there. It would be important for you to get as familiar as you can with the foundation. Whether it’s calling up the grant making team. Going on the Soros Foundations general website, reading the annual report or going to an organization like the Foundation Center. So that you understand where you fit in to the picture.
Also, we have received some proposals in the past that are generic. That is to say, the proposals look like they’ve been shopped around just about any funder in town, instead of being tailored to the particular areas that we fund or to the particular philosophy that we espouse. Although it does require a little bit more work on your part, we do suggest that you personalize your proposal so that we can get to know your organization, but we can also know you’ve taken the time to get to know us a little bit. Because it is a reciprocal relationship that we’re developing.
I think that’s all I’d like to say for now unless you have any questions. Thank you again for listening. I hope to hear from you.
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