Embedded Funders and Community Change: Profiles

Source: Chapin Hall Center for Children (University of Chicago)

Date: 2006

Abstract:
Chapin Hall launched a new research effort in the summer of 2005 to identify a cohort of embedded funders. The intent was to deepen our and the field’s understanding about this philanthropic approach, to test whether the embedded funder characteristics identified in a previous report held across a range of different kinds of foundations and communities, and to push forward with developing an understanding of what embedded funders might have to teach the rest of philanthropy about promoting positive community change. Chapin Hall contacted regional grant-maker associations across the country, foundation affinity groups, and experts on philanthropy in its search to identify additional embedded funders. Through a series of conference calls and then multi-day site visits, we eventually narrowed our field of study and examined in-depth a new cohort of twelve embedded funders that include private, community, family, and hospital conversion foundations working in inner-city and rural communities. Chapin Hall developed profiles of each of these funders’ community-change initiatives, which are captured here, and then invited this new group of embedded funders to another peer convening. The construction of these foundation profiles and the second peer convening helped to highlight a number of issues that Chapin Hall is now confident in suggesting are distinctive of and critical to the embedded-funding model across a range of foundation types, communities, and issues of focus, and that may have broader relevance for foundations involved and/or interested in community change. Foundations include: Birmingham Foundation (Alabama); Comer Science and Education Foundation (Chicago, Illinois); Denver Foundation (Colorado); Rosamond Gifford Charitable Corporation (Syracuse, New York); Humboldt Area Foundation (California); Incarnate Word Foundation (St. Louis, Missouri); J. F. Maddox Foundation (Hobbs, New Mexico); Pfizer Inc. (Brooklyn, New York); Piton Foundation (Denver, Colorado); Self Family Foundation (Greenwood, South Carolina); Walker Foundation (Jackson, Mississippi); Woodard Family Foundation (Cottage Grove, Oregon).

Link: Embedded Funders and Community Change: Profiles

Keyword: Partnership

Region: Northern America