Announcing Youth Organizing Capacity Building Initiative Grantees
The Southern California Youth Organizing Funder Collaborative is pleased to announce a total of $4.1 million in grants to 26 nonprofits engaged in youth organizing. This three-year initiative aims to strengthen the effectiveness of nonprofits working to increase the number of young people leading social justice grassroots campaigns, especially from communities most impacted by racial, economic and social injustice. Grantees will receive multi-year Unrestricted Operating Support grants and participate in a peer learning community. The Funder Collaborative includes the Annenberg Foundation, California Community Foundation, Liberty Hill Foundation, The California Endowment, and the Weingart Foundation. We look forward to sharing our collective learnings from the initiative as it progresses. For a full list of initiative grantees, click here.
Q&A with Joyce Ybarra, Director of Learning: The Case for Unrestricted Operating Support
The Weingart Foundation’s core grantmaking strategy is to provide unrestricted funding to organizations advancing racial, social and economic equity. In order to deepen our understanding of the impact of our Unrestricted Operating Support, in 2017 and 2018 we worked with our evaluation partner, Harder+Company Community Research, to develop a series of case profiles that detail the work of four grantee partners. The case profiles provide us with important insights into how Unrestricted Operating Support can strengthen organizational capacity and effectiveness. In this Q&A, Joyce Ybarra, director of learning, highlights her main takeaways from the research.
Weingart Foundation Aligns Investments with Social Justice Mission
At the Weingart Foundation, we are committed to align all of our policies and practices to advance racial, social and economic justice. This commitment includes the management of our investment portfolio. Going forward, it is our goal to use all of the Foundation’s resources to advocate for our values and maximize our mission impact. This year, the Weingart Foundation board of directors revised the Foundation’s investment policy to prioritize investments that support economic and community empowerment to achieve a more just and sustainable society, as well as to promote diversity and inclusion among entrepreneurs and asset managers. Correspondingly, the Foundation will prohibit direct investments in areas that negatively impact poor communities and communities of color—including private prisons, gun manufacturers and tobacco. Our board also approved a new procurement policy elevating the selection of vendors that promote diversity and share our values. Click here to see our new investment policy, and here to see our new procurement policy.