Deadline: 16-Jan-24
The van Beuren Charitable Foundation is seeking applications to invest in the quality of life and quality of place of Aquidneck Island and surrounding communities.
van Beuren Charitable Foundation partners with the community to find innovative and practical ways to achieve their mission. To accomplish this, they focus on supporting projects and programs in four priority areas: Strong Starts, Healthy Lifestyles, Community Prosperity, and Excellence in the Commons.
Grant Priorities
- Strong Starts
- Goal: Children and youth have a strong start in life, benefitting from a supportive community and an education that prepares them for the future.
- Healthy Lifestyles
- Goal: Residents experience health throughout their lives.
- Community Prosperity
- Goal: Regional economic growth creates opportunities for residents and enterprises.
- Excellence in the Commons
- Goal: Quality common spaces and institutions make their communities desirable places to live, work, and play.
Funding Information
- This year, vBCF will again offer a limited number of grants—typically averaging $3,500 to $5,000, not to exceed $10,000—to nonprofit organizations aligned with vBCF’s mission to help them address capacity needs by procuring technical assistance from a coach or consultant.
Criteria
- The van Beuren Charitable Foundation funds projects, programs, and capital. Preference is given to proposals that demonstrate the greatest likelihood of achieving measurable results in their four priority areas. Successful grant applications present a realistic and persuasive case statement describing the positive impact potential funding will have on the targeted constituency or community. Applicants should demonstrate a clear understanding of the environment in which the project or program will operate, including reference to other stakeholders and service providers. Proposals must include data that explains the existing situation and a method to track anticipated improvements. Demonstrated organizational capacity to manage the program or project is also an important component. Please give careful consideration to how the project fits within your organization’s mission, the risks and benefits it presents to the organization, and the critical prerequisites to success. Proposals should also indicate how a project or program will be sustained (if appropriate) without ongoing funding from the vBCF.
- Aquidneck Island and Newport County remain at the center of their work. They recognize that communities are part of larger systems and economies and they welcome proposals from outside this region that can make a clear case for the benefit to their target communities.
- Their grant making priorities focus on the impact they aspire to make in the community. These grant priority areas are intentionally designed to recognize the connections between education, health, economic development, and place. Emphasis in the grant consideration process will be on the impact the proposed activities will have on one or more of these grant priority areas.
- Across their priority areas, they invest in design that connects the improvement of buildings and landscapes to community aspirations. The Foundation is open to innovative and collaborative approaches, encouraging proposals in the discovery, planning and pilot stages.
- Additionally, they invest in strengthening organizations. Periodically they offer free workshops and webinars, and convene learning cohorts around issues important to organizations in the community. Every year, they also offer capacity grants on a rolling basis to nonprofit organizations aligned with the Foundation’s mission, to help them address capacity needs with assistance from a coach or consultant.
- The Foundation does not make grants to individuals, for general operating purposes (except on occasion for longstanding partners), to support lobbying, or to attempt to influence legislation.
For more information, visit van Beuren Charitable Foundation.