Grants

Toronto Community Foundation head discusses the organizations unique business model and being named "Outstanding Foundation" by the AFP Greater Toronto.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, has announced the 23 recipients of its 2010 MacArthur Fellowships. Commonly referred to as the "genius awards," the fellowships single out individuals from disparate disciplines who show creativity, originality, and the promise for continued innovative work.

welve women and 11 men won this year's awards; they range in age from 30 to 72. Each fellow receives $500,000 over five years, bestowed with no strings attached. Of the group announced today, 16 fellows work at academic institutions or other nonprofit organizations.

Common Ground National, one of the nation’s largest providers of supportive housing, announced it has been awarded a $200,000 grant from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation for its 100,000 Homes Campaign, a three year effort to house 100,000 long term and vulnerable homeless by July of 2013. This is among the largest grants received to date for the 100,000 Homes Campaign, which works with communities across the nation to organize local volunteer survey teams who administer public health surveys to identify the homeless with the most serious health needs.

Women in Philanthropy awarded $47,000 in grants to community organizations Thursday evening, more than four times what the group contributed last year.

Eight nonprofit organizations were chosen for grants: The Naomi Project, Mercy Medicine’s Healthy Smiles Program, Lighthouse Ministries, McLeod Health Foundation, Mercy in Me Free Medical Clinic of Cheraw, the Pee Dee Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Assault, the Senior Citizens Association’s Home Care Services and Camp RAE.

This October, the Foundation Center will hold its annual Funding for Arts Month with special events, classes, and resources aimed at helping artists and nonprofit arts organizations become better grantseekers and increase their funding.

At free programs in the Center's Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, locations, participants can discover fundraising strategies, network with fellow artists and colleagues, and gain insight into their local arts funding community.

A three-year, $9 million grant program focused entirely on arts and culture in Philadelphia is to be announced Wednesday by the Knight Foundation, a Miami-based philanthropy. Dubbed the Knight Arts Challenge - funding from the foundation must be matched from other sources - the program seeks applications focused on every arts sector and from individuals as well as organizations and institutions.

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting has received a $100,000 grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. The bilingual investigative nonprofit group received the grant last week.

The center's mission is to work in the state's public interest by exposing corruption, waste and miscarriages of justice. The center's office is located at the International Media Center, a nonprofit program at Florida International University dedicated to training journalists in Latin America. The center's reporting will be published online and through media partners.

A dollar a month may not seem like much, but it can go a long way to improving literacy skills in communities across New Jersey while also giving people the opportunity to succeed. Thanks to the generosity of Verizon customers in New Jersey who participated in the company's Check Into Literacy program, 51 nonprofit organizations throughout the state received $250,000 in grants to support literacy programs.

Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical company, announced today that it will commit $200-million over five years to improve the health of women and children in poor countries.

Three-quarters of the commitment from the company, in New Brunswick, N.J., will be in the form of cash grants to nonprofit organizations; the rest will be medicines and other supplies.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has received a $4.5 million pledge to its recovery efforts - the single largest vote of confidence to date in its still-evolving institutional vision. The award comes from the William Penn Foundation, which specifically cited the orchestra's new leadership as an impetus and stipulated that the money be split into three separate allocations:

$3 million will go directly to the orchestra's emergency bridge fund, bringing to $13 million the total raised for the effort, which has a current goal of $15 million.