Foundations

The Virginia Early Childhood Foundation (VECF) announced today that the Danville Regional Foundation (DRF) has awarded an unprecedented five-year grant of over $5.4 million for Smart Beginnings Danville-Pittsylvania County to dramatically expand the region’s commitment to school readiness for thousands of young children.

Foundation giving is expected to tick up modestly in 2011, but it may take several years before grants match pre-recession levels, according to a survey by the Foundation Center, in New York. The survey of more than 700 grant makers found that a slightly higher share planned to give more next year than in 2009 (21 percent) than planned to give less (15 percent). Fifty-nine percent predicted that their giving would be flat. (The remaining 6 percent of respondents were uncertain.)

As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars drag on, a growing number of grant makers around the country, like the Wolslager Foundation, are paying closer attention to the vast and escalating needs of service members, veterans, and their families.

But experts working to shape and expand grant making to help service members and their families say the philanthropic response has been too small, slow, and piecemeal. They say reluctance to get involved with military causes and ignorance of the immense needs are among the reasons too few grant makers are getting involved.

The Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation announced Together on Diabetes^®: Communities Uniting to Meet America’s Diabetes Challenge, a 5-year, $100 million initiative to help patients living with type 2 diabetes better manage their disease beyond the doors of their doctor’s office – in their homes and communities – and for the course of their disease.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $50 million to the Smithsonian Institution, the national museum announced late Wednesday.

The money will go principally to the Youth Access Endowment, a new entitly created by the Smithsonian. Gates is giving $30 million of the gift to "reach underserved students" in the United States. The endowment targets students in grades K-12, and will create a series of interactive Web sites and online conferences.

Health care organizations in California, Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania were awarded $1.6 million to support their efforts to eliminate racial and ethnic health care disparities in communities across the United States. The funding provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change expands the program’s grant portfolio to include projects evaluating interventions in a variety of different settings.

Here are nine key things funders want and expect from fundraisers during the grant proposal application process.

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

A philanthropic watchdog group is hoping to light a fire under charitable foundations that support education by releasing a report Wednesday that points out how few of them focus enough attention on helping the most needy students.

The study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy said that only 11 percent of American foundations devoted at least half their grants to programs that benefit vulnerable students. It looked at 672 foundations that gave at least $1 million to educational causes from 2006 to 2008.

Foundation leaders are starting to use social media but not yet making it a regular part of their work, a new report says.

While many foundation executives regularly use more traditional social media like e-newsletters and Listerves, much fewer leaders are using so-called "Web 2.0" applications such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Podcasts on a regular basis, says the report by the Foundation Center.