Understand Our Grantmaking
Let’s help make more lives better by connecting more people with more opportunities.
The Values Informing Our Grantmaking
Our approach to grantmaking is guided by a set of core values.
- In a just and equitable city, there are resources and opportunities for all.
- We want your ideas for making more opportunities available, particularly for people from communities that have been excluded from them.
- No one knows a community better than the people who live there. We design grantmaking strategies informed by community perspectives. We fund organizations and initiatives built on that input, and we encourage collaboration across communities.
- Share your best ideas with us. Community organizations, nonprofit leaders, and the people who stand to benefit from our objectives can propose the best ways to achieve them. Even if you’ve never worked with us before, reach out. We’d love to hear from you.
- We accomplish more together. We work with other funders – locally, regionally, and nationally – and bridge public and private sectors. We engage regularly with grantees and community stakeholders to exchange information and maximize impact. We share openly the goals and guidelines for our work and make sure our staff is available to the community.
- You can team up to respond to an RFP. We love collaboration, whether among organizations seeking grants or among funders who believe in the power of collective action to reach shared objectives.
- The stakes of climate change run high, particularly in communities with fewer financial resources.
- What are your ideas for reducing harmful impacts to natural environments, improving the quality of natural and community spaces, and preparing for the impacts of climate change?
- Complex problems require clear positions. We train a spotlight on the issues, convene and fund problem-solvers and stakeholders, and remain nimble to balance long-range and short-term needs. We do this work in a nonpartisan way and without lobbying.
- As the needs of the city and region change, we will issue RFPs for your best ideas about how to address those changes. Feel free to also share your best thinking on how to address time-sensitive needs through our Open Application process.
- We share expertise, experiences, and lessons learned – from grantees, staff, and the research and evaluations we fund – so that we can all learn together and help make the world better for everyone.
- What might you learn from the work and findings of others? Browse our Insights tab for research and reporting that may align with or help inform your own approaches.
As a funder, our focus is on this central idea: Let’s help make more lives better by connecting more people with more opportunities. As part of that work, we pay particular attention to supporting people and communities in the Philadelphia region that have historically been shut out of opportunities and resources for a variety of reasons.
In each of our five programs, we have specific objectives we are pursuing through grantmaking to help achieve that central idea. The program objectives are intended to make our funding transparent and accountable.
We make grants in two ways.
Requests for Proposals (RFPs): The majority of funding is awarded through RFPs that are released throughout the year on a predictable and public schedule. Each RFP seeks to advance a specific objective and includes the specific criteria we’ll use to evaluate your proposals and the total grant funding that is available. Any organization implementing a project that can advance the RFP’s objective is welcome to apply for funding.
- Open Application: We also make other grants, on a much more limited basis, through our open application process to help address gaps in the pursuit of an objective or to support time-sensitive projects that will make a significant contribution toward an objective. We learn about these ideas through our ongoing engagement with communities across the city. You can share your ideas for advancing an objective at any time.
The Foundation’s Board of Directors sets budget allocations for each of our grantmaking programs. To advance the Foundation’s grantmaking value of transparency, and to help our community understand how resources are being used, we are providing our initial budget allocations below. Budgets have been allocated to advance the specific objectives that the Foundation developed through considerable stakeholder input. In addition, they are reflective of the Foundation’s past experience in a sector along with potential funding opportunities that staff and Board have identified in the next several years. You will see that newer programs are generally smaller than programs where we have more experience. As we learn more from our community and grantees about these newer program areas, it is possible that allocations may change. Our Board will be reviewing budget allocations on a periodic basis to ensure that we are using funds most effectively to advance the defined objectives and to sustain work that is having significant positive benefits for residents and their communities.
Grant budget allocation by program
| Annual Range | |
| Arts and Culture | $34-38M |
| Children and Families | $40-45M |
| Democracy and Civic Initiatives | $15-20M |
| Environment and Public Space | $40-45M |
| Workforce Training and Services | $3-5M |
Open Requests for Proposals
We’re interested in project proposals that can advance our specific objectives and help achieve meaningful change in our communities.