Operational Guidelines: How We Do Our Work

  • We serve communities based on where the Founder’s family lives and works.
  • We respect grantees, their leadership, and staff. Foundation interactions with grantees honor those grantees’ expertise and commitment to their work.
  • We support innovation and entrepreneurial ideas and solutions whenever possible in our grantmaking.
  • We favor creating leverage for our funders and we regularly support challenge and matching grant opportunities.
  • Our approach is rigorously focused on accountability and measurable outcomes.
  • We strive to be recognized for our leadership, sensitivity, and responsiveness to community needs.
  • We offer Foundation grantees both funding and, drawing on the Foundation’s internal expertise, other types of support that may help them achieve their goals.
  • We value feedback and honest critique of our work from grantees and community partners. We seek input and assessment from stakeholders to inform and improve our work.
  • We invest in “best in class” organizations with strong leadership and the capacity to scale. We pursue longer-term relationships with these partners and consider multi-year, capital investments where appropriate.
  • We are committed to providing more modest financial support to smaller organizations, which fill important roles in the community and show promise for future potential.
  • We understand the needs of not-for-profit organizations to seek general operating support and to conduct capital campaigns and we are open to providing this kind of support to organizations with whom we have a favorable funding history.