Donor funds, when supporting the right efforts, can transform people’s lives and communities. The issues we focus on are among the most challenging facing society, but the programs and organizations we profile demonstrate daily that positive impact can be created.
Strengthening Democracy
While multiple measures show that U.S. democracy is weakening, local and national organizations are shoring the underpinnings of civil society. We identified nonprofits through our work for We the People: A Philanthropic Guide to Strengthening Democracy. These organizations are increasing civic engagement and reinvigorating local media, two ways to rebuild the essential elements of democracy.
American Journalism Project:
The American Journalism Project (AJP) is an initiative that seeks to grow the resources available for local journalism by investing in a new model for sustainable, mission-based news organizations.
City Bureau
This nonprofit civic journalism lab based on the south side of Chicago has been reinventing local journalism. With its programs, City Bureau provides more comprehensive and relevant coverage by expanding and diversifying the sources of information it uses to inform stories.
Draw the Lines PA
This initiative helps citizens make informed and effective contributions to the debate on gerrymandering, fosters broad participation through in-person events, and facilitates face-to-face meetings between citizens and policymakers.
Faith in Action
Faith in Action is a national network of community organizers fighting against racism, discrimination, and economic inequality.
Generation Citizen
Generation Citizen (GC) helps teachers incorporate action-based projects into civics education, preparing students to be active participants in democracy.
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League of Women Voters Maine
League of Women Voters Maine is a nonpartisan political organization that encourages informed and active political participation and aims to increase understanding of public policy issues.
Orton Family Foundation
Many U.S. towns and small cities have been destabilized by growth and development, while others are suffering from loss of industry, population decline, and uncertainty over their future. To empower community responses to these challenges, the Orton Family Foundation supports resident-driven town planning through its Community Heart & Soul program.
Resolve Philly
COVID-19 highlighted what WHO terms an “infodemic”—endless information, but much of it is unreliable or contradictory. Resolve Philly supports opportunities for journalists to report collaboratively and accurately to better inform and serve their communities.
Mental Health & Addiction
Mental health and substance use disorders have an outsized impact on families and communities, yet services and treatments to address them are drastically underfunded. In Health in Mind: A Philanthropic Guide for Mental Health and Addiction, we describe five strategies for improving mental health and addiction services at every level and stage. These organizations are putting those strategies into practice.
Meta House
Meta House’s residential program provides comprehensive services such as education on the effects of drug and alcohol use, individual and group therapy, prenatal care, and vocational training to women and children.
Nurse-Family Partnership
Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) is a community program that reduces the impact of “toxic stress”—the type caused by homelessness, hunger, neglect, or exposure to violence— by supporting parents and improving access to services that ensure better health for the entire family.
Pathways to Housing PA
Pathways to Housing PA uses a Housing First model to provide integrated health services, community engagement, skills building, and employment assistance to chronically homeless individuals living with mental health disorders and addiction in Philadelphia.
Prevention Point Philadelphia
Prevention Point Philadelphia is a nonprofit public health organization providing harm reduction services to Philadelphia and currently serves over 17,000 clients in communities affected by drug use and poverty.
Youth Villages
One in four former foster youth experience homelessness, half end up unemployed, close to 70% become involved in the criminal justice system, and up to 80% will experience a mental health disorder or addiction. Youth Villages YVLifeSet program aims to help this group become successful, independent adults.
Opportunity Youth
BELL
BELL Summer is a full-day, five- to- eight week summer program serving low income students in partnership with school districts in 20 states and Washington, D.C.
Career Academics
Career academies operate as schools within high schools that allow students to take both career-related and academic courses, as well as acquiring work experience through partnerships with local employers.
Center for Employment Opportunities
The Center for Employment Opportunities provides short-term paid transitional employment, life skills education, full-time job placement, and post-placement services to formerly incarcerated individuals.
Citizen Schools
Citizen Schools partners with 20 middle schools to enhance and expand the learning day for about 3,500 middle school students in eight urban districts in California, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina.
College Advisory Corps (CAC)
College Advising Corps (CAC) recruits and places recent college graduates who act as dedicated college advisers in low-resource schools to provide individual support for the college application process.
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Grads of Life
The crux of Grads of Life’s work is to shift employer perceptions of opportunity youth from social liabilities to economic assets, and help hiring professionals broaden and diversify their talent pools to include young, non traditional candidates.
Goodwill Excel Centers
The Excel Centers are public charter schools that offer a path to a high school diploma (rather than GED), as well as industry-recognized certifications and even post-graduate education to better meet the needs of older youth, adults, and parents.
Jobs for the Future
Jobs for the Future’s Early College High School initiative works to integrate rigorous, credit-bearing college courses into high school curricula through partnerships among colleges, districts, and high schools.
New Teacher Center
NTC works closely with district partners to train veteran teachers as mentors and coaches who work intensively with new teachers over a two-year period to produce experienced professionals that are equipped to better the educational system.
Year Up
Year Up provides low- and moderate-income high school/GED graduates with six months of skills education, followed by six months of hands-on training at a corporate internship.
Youth Build Philadelphia
Some 2.4 million young adults ages 16 to 24 have dropped out of school. YouthBuild offers a second chance to obtain a high school diploma, real-life work opportunities, and opportunities in further educational attainment and career access.
Youth Guidance
Youth Guidance’s programs works with small groups of 12 to 15 students in grades 7 through 12, to develop important decision-making skills, especially those related to issues such as violence, relationships, dropping out of high school, and criminal activity.
Youth Villages
One in four former foster youth experience homelessness, half end up unemployed, close to 70% become involved in the criminal justice system, and up to 80% will experience a mental health disorder or addiction. Youth Villages YVLifeSet program aims to help this group become successful, independent adults.
Community Based Health
BRAC Manoshi Proejct
In Bangladesh, BRAC’s Manoshi Project provides a range of health services for women, children, and adolescents in growing urban slums.
Curamericas
Curamericas Global works through its in-country partner, Curamericas Guatemala, to provide health services to a population of 8,700 indigenous people in a remote mountain region of northwest Guatemala.
Global FoodBanking Network
Global FoodBanking Network (GFN) works to solve the world’s food problem by creating, sustaining, certifying, and strengthening food banks.
Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Haiti
For over 60 years, HAS has helped develop a local health system in the rural Artibonite Valley of central Haiti and works closely with the local community to develop its health workforce and operate a comprehensive local health network.
Last Mile Health
Last Mile Health partners with local governments to enhance access to primary health care services for remote communities in Liberia.
Lwala Community Alliance
Founded to combat the high number of preventable maternal and child death that communities in Lwala, Kenya faced, the Lwala Community Alliance provides accessible health services and directly serves a population of 125,000.
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SEARCH
The Society for Education, Action, and Research in Community Health (SEARCH) works to address poverty, illiteracy, and poor health outcomes for the neglected rural and tribal communities in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, India.
Partners in Health
In the late 1990s, PIH pioneered community-based care for HIV-positive patients in rural Haiti and since then, has hired and trained more than 12,000 community health workers (CHWs) around the world to become trusted sources of support while supervising treatment.
The Comprehensive Rural Health Project, Jamkhed
Through CRHP’s “Jamkhed Model,” Village Health Workers (VHWs), local women selected by their communities, provide essential primary care and health education to their village, in partnership with CRHP’s Mobile Health Teams and local health facilities.
Village Reach
VillageReach works with ministries of health throughout sub-Saharan Africa to increase access to quality health services, with an emphasis on strengthening the “last mile” needed to connect rural and hard-to-reach communities to health resources.
Early Childhood
Appletree Institute
AppleTree works to close the achievement gap between “at-risk” three- and four-year-old children and their more advantaged peers by providing them with social, emotional, and cognitive skills needed to excel in school.
Campaign for Grade Level Reading
CGLR promotes awareness about the importance of grade level reading, provides technical support to its network communities, and facilitates learning across communities so that they can replicate effective approaches.
Child First
Through home visitation family therapy workshops, Child First serves families with children under 6 years of age at risk for involvement in Child Protective Services (CPS).
Children’s Literacy Initiative
Children’s Literacy Initiative aims to close the literacy gap for disadvantaged children by providing school-level instructional support in the form of providing professional development for teachers in literacy instruction.
Child-Parent Centers
The Child-Parent Center program (CPC) provides comprehensive educational, family support, and healthcare services to economically disadvantaged children from ages 3-9.
City Connects
Based at Boston College, City Connects trains and places coordinators within partner schools to work with teachers and staff to assess the needs and strengths of students in four domains: academic, social-emotional learning, health, and family.
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Educare
Educare works to increase access to high-quality early education programs tailored to meet the needs of disadvantaged children in low-income neighborhoods.
Incredible Years & Invest in Kids
The Incredible Years is a suite of prevention programs designed to help children form strong and protective bonds with caring adults by providing comprehensive social-emotional and behavior management supports to parents, children, and teachers.
Jumpstart
Jumpstart is a national early education organization that mobilizes volunteers to deliver a research-based, structured early literacy curriculum to preschool children from under-resourced communities.
Nurse-Family Partnership
Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) is a community program that reduces the impact of “toxic stress”—the type caused by homelessness, hunger, neglect, or exposure to violence— by supporting parents and improving access to services that ensure better health for the entire family.
Springboard Collaborative
Springboard Collaborative, a nonprofit based in Philadelphia, runs an intensive summer literacy program for students and their families using a hands-on approach that not only involves students and teachers, but also parents.