Grants
The Skoll Foundation announced the 2011 recipients of the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship: Rebecca Onie, Health Leads; Ned Breslin, Water For People; Ellen Moir, New Teacher Center; and Madhav Chavan, Pratham. Skoll Award recipients receive a three-year grant and join the growing global network of now 85 Skoll social entrepreneurs from 70 organizations who are tackling the world’s most pressing problems.
The Board of Directors of The James Irvine Foundation has approved 12 grants totaling more than $4.4 million in support of the Foundation's mission of expanding opportunity for the people of California to participate in a vibrant, successful and inclusive society. (For a list of approved grants, click here.)
IBM selected 24 cities worldwide to receive IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grants. The grants provide the cities with access to IBM's top experts to analyze and recommend ways they can become even better place in which to live, work and play.
The grant winners:
Antofagasta, Chile
Boulder, CO
Bucharest, Romania
Chengdu, China
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Delhi, India
Edmonton, Canada
Eindhoven, Netherlands
Glasgow, UK
Guadalajara, Mexico
Helsinki, Finland
Jakarta, Indonesia
Milwaukee, WI
New Orleans, LA
Newark, NJ
Nice, France
Philadelphia, PA
Providence, RI
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Sapporo, Japan
St. Louis, MO
Syracuse, NY
Townsville, Australia Tshwane-Pretoria, South Africa
A new channel has recently become available for nonprofits to streamline their search for foundation funding. Developed by the firm Foundation Source the network is known as Foundation Source Access. Instead of writing and submitting a variety of proposals separately to numerous foundations, nonprofits can create their own profiles and fundraising project pages where they can incorporate a variety of media. A built in community of private foundations can then search the project directory and give to a nonprofit in a simple, single application.
Washington STEM, a new state-wide education nonprofit, has made an inaugural investment of $2.4 million to 15 educators, schools and education nonprofits from all corners of the state. The inaugural grantees represent leading edge ideas with evidence of success across the K-12 spectrum throughout Washington state. Each grantee is generating discoveries that will have far reaching benefits for communities beyond their own.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave out far less money in 2010 than anticipated because staff members were given the option of distributing some of their grant dollars in later years, according to the fund’s chief executive, Jeffrey Raikes.
The world’s largest philanthropy donated $2.6-billion last year, compared with $3-billion in 2009, because program officers decided to hold off on distributing about $500-million in grants. That money is now available for 2011.
Grant making by the country’s richest foundations is expected to tick up only slightly in 2011, according to a new Chronicle survey based on data from 187 funds.
The modest increase would come after two successive years of gains in foundation assets following the 2008 stock-market plunge that gobbled up a third of the foundation world’s wealth.
However, foundation endowments remain roughly 17 percent lower than before the recession, according to data from 65 grant makers for which The Chronicle has five years of data.
A new grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation illustrates the way lines have blurred between traditional media and new ways to communicate about health and development.
At $20 million, the five-year grant to the BBC World Service Trust is the foundation's largest so far with a media connection. But foundation officials say it is not like previous grants to news organizations, including ABC and PBS.
"This grant does not support the news gathering capacity of the BBC," foundation spokesman Chris Williams wrote in an e-mail. "This grant is essentially public education."
In a continued effort to fight childhood obesity, The Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living, part of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), has been awarded a four-year grant for $3.7 million grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.
With the new funding, the Center plans to expand its child health research. This grant provides funding for the Center to establish new initiatives such as a communications core, a community advisory board and a core for data analysis.
The CTK Foundation is proud to launch the 2011 Heart and Soul Grant Competition. Nonprofits of all sizes and types are invited to apply their creativity to win major grants of funds and technology.
Applicants are asked to submit an original four-to-eight-line poem that reflects the work and/or mission of the applicant nonprofit organization. This poem may be written by staff members, clients and/or volunteers of the submitting nonprofit, and must be wholly original.