Grants

The Department for International Development (DFID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced a coordinated effort to reduce hunger and poverty in developing countries by supporting agricultural research projects to help small farmers increase their yields and incomes. DFID and the foundation will work together to identify the projects, and the foundation’s Agricultural Development initiative will manage them.

A Sacramento nonprofit will receive close to $100,000 to fight hunger, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday.

Community Services Planning Council will receive $99,396 to survey low-income residents to determine the causes, consequences and extent of hunger in Sacramento County – and then develop a plan to try to eliminate hunger in the county.

The USDA is investing $4.98 million in grants to 14 communities in eight states to end hunger and improve the nutrition of low-income Americans.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new role as conservator of the Watts Towers has brought an almost immediate payoff: a $500,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation, announced Wednesday, to help fund repair and preservation of the landmark folk-art masterpiece.

Before the grant came through, only $150,000 in city funding had been budgeted for the towers this year.

Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) and the Ford Foundation announced the winners of the Space for Change Planning and Pre-Development Grants, awarding up to $100,000 each to 12 nonprofit arts organizations in the early stages of developing exemplary cultural facilities. The grants provide organizations with the initial startup funds that are most needed—and the most difficult to obtain—to develop new space.

The New York City-based Foundation Center, the European Foundation Centre in Brussels, and the Ford Foundation have announced that GrantCraft, a Web-based effort to equip grantmakers with an array of tools designed to enhance their effectiveness, is moving from Ford to the two centers. In addition, Ford, which incubated GrantCraft, has awarded $1 million to the two organizations to help expand the initiative.

UPS announced grants totaling $7 million to more than 80 nonprofit organizations whose mission is to support diverse populations. These grants will fund programs that develop leadership skills, promote education and encourage inclusion of all individuals.

Organizations receiving grants include the Human Rights Campaign, National Council of La Raza, National Urban League, NAACP, Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Paralyzed Veterans of America, National Federation of the Blind, and Girls Inc.

Yogurt-maker Dannon will award grants of $30,000 to four nonprofit organizations for programs that promote healthy eating and support nutrition education for children in Salt lake County and three other communities where a Dannon facility is located.

Applications are due by March 29, 2011.

Last year, $120,000 in grants benefited nearly 4,000 children and families nationwide; and since the inception of the Dannon Next Generation Grant program, more than $580,000 has benefited nearly 14,000 children and their families.

Teach For America, the education organization that places recent college graduates in low-income public schools, is getting $100 million to launch its first-ever endowment in hopes of making the grass-roots organization a permanent fixture in education. The program — which is now in communities from Atlanta to rural New Mexico to Los Angeles — announced Thursday that four philanthropists are joining to create a stable, long-term source of money. It's welcome news for an organization that had more than 46,000 applications for just 4,400 teaching slots this academic year.

Six different groups received $200,000 grants from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and they’ll be offering (likely competing) proposals later this year aimed at tackling the country’s fiscal problems.

The proposals will be unveiled as part of the Peterson Foundation’s fiscal summit later this year. Each proposal will be compared with the baseline the Congressional Budget Office offers later this month. They come as Washington is wrangling over how best to cut spending and could be used to shape budget battles or negotiations over entitlement programs.

The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, which has assets of about $280 million, is being broken into thirds and dished out to the foundations of each of the offspring.

The handover won't happen for nearly two years, and in the meantime the 60-year-old foundation will continue to hand out grants, said fund Executive Director Amy Lyons.

Then, on Dec. 31, 2012, the fund will shut its doors and the existing foundations of John and Douglas Goldman and their sister, Susan Gelman, will receive whatever assets are in the fund's pot.