From Family Giving to a Focus on Place Gordon Wean on the Evolution of the Raymond John Wean Foundation The story that Gordon Wean, Chairman of the Raymond John Wean Foundation, shared at Grassroots Grantmakers’ 2009 On the Ground in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley was so inspiring that we decided that it needed to be shared with [...]
A Retrospective Assessment of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation’s Community Foundations and Neighborhoods Small Grants Program Prepared by Tom Burns & Laura Downs for Grassroots Grantmakers With support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation For funders interested in healthy neighborhood where residents are bringing their energy and creativity to solving local problems and influencing larger, community-wide [...]
A Retrospective Assessment of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation’s Community Foundations and Neighborhoods Small Grants Program Prepared by Tom Burns & Laura Downs for Grassroots Grantmakers With support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
A report on the “Governance at the Neighborhood Level” meeting organized by Grassroots Grantmakers and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium,with assistance from the National League of Cities and NeighborWorks America. by Matt Leighninger The Promise and Challenge of Neighborhood Democracy: Lessons from the Intersection of Government and Community.grew out a meeting that Grassroots Grantmakers and the [...]
An “on the ground” reflection about what it takes for funders to work effective with low-income communities.. A report by The Diarist Project for Grassroots Grantmakers 2009 This report is a set of reflections that began with conversations among fifty people who gathered in Chicago in September of 2008 for Grassroots Grantmakers first “on the ground” [...]
By: Kristin Senty The Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation’s First Step for Community Engagement A Special Publication from Grassroots Grantmakers One way that Grassroots Grantmakers connects and strengthens funders who are working from a “we begin with residents” perspective is to share innovative practices and learning from their on the ground work. This is our premiere [...]
A Special Publication from Grassroots Grantmakers and Neighborhood Connections Some cities like Cleveland have dealt with the foreclosure problem long before it became a national epidemic. Residents, public officials, key organizations and institutions found new ways to work together to counteract the negative impact. Individuals at the grassroots level have played an essential role, lacing [...]
By: Brown, Chaskin, Richman & Weber Embedded Funders and Community Change: Profiles, published by Chapin Hall Center for Children in 2006, provides descriptions of twelve foundations included in a second cohort of funders.
A Genuine Democratization & Engagement Strategy A Special Publication from Grassroots Grantmakers Grassroots grants are an effective way to get residents engaged and invested in their own communities. Now a number of funders are taking the idea one step further, turning the grantmaking decisions over to the residents who live and work in the community [...]
The tricky thing about grassroots grantmaking is that it operates in the nebulous gray space of the funding world. Behind the foundation walls are dollars and cents that add up very neatly, accounts receivable records coming through humming fax machines, and proof of non-profit status reports in piles across cubicle desks. On the streets ofClevelandCity’s [...]
A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of attending my first Neighborhood Connections Final Report Party. What is a Final Report Party, you ask? Well, at the close of a grantee’s project year they have the option to complete their final report in several different ways. The first is to write a traditional, [...]
