Category: Foundations

Private Grants Are They for You(1)

Private Grants: Are They for You?

Six steps to making a grants assessment. By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA and Sheldon Bart Here’s a tale of two real nonprofits. Let’s call the first one Amazing Youth, and the second The Real Deal Healthcare. Amazing Youth operates a transitional shelter for homeless youth limited by law to a modest number of residents, fewer than 10. The Real Deal Healthcare operates a community health center serving thousands of low-income patients. Both are LAPA clients. What they have in common is that for many years both neglected private grant revenue. Eventually, each one came to understand the value of outsourcing

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Site Visits in the Zoom Age

By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA & Sheldon Bart  In what we might call the BC era (Before COVID), site visits mainly entailed a tour of your nonprofit’s facility. You took the foundation program officer or the major donor on a walk around the program site to give them a good look at your day-to-day operations. They were happy to see in action the services described in words in your proposal or application. The tour consumed most of the time available for the visit, with a few minutes left over for questions. Now, after the disease disrupted our routines (or AD),

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Donor Advised Funds: Why Community Foundations Should Endorse the ACE Act

By Alan Cantor Watch a recent in-depth LAPA webinar on the subject of Donor-Advised Funds Some people simply can’t take “yes” for an answer. How else can one explain how some community foundation leaders rejected the thoughtful set of reforms contained in the Accelerating Charitable Efforts (ACE) Act — a series of measures to reform Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) that would actually serve community foundations well? For years, the lobbying arm of community foundations — the Community Foundations Public Awareness Initiative — has embraced a business model in which it fights any form of reforms around DAFs, no matter how mild.

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Foundations Aren’t Much Interested in You

“America’s foundations are not particularly interested in receiving your proposal.” – Bradford K. Smith, President of Candid

Grateful for Brad Smith’s candor and leadership over the years, I rang him up for a chat. Initially, I wanted to know if what our grant officers suspected was in fact true—that most foundations do not welcome your proposals.

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Children’s Defense Fund Finds 44 New Funding Opportunities

LAPA Fundraising is expert in fundraising services (campaigns, annual funds, planning services, and grants). We conduct desk studies to identify new funders and donors. These research exercises have proven to be an excellent first step and a tremendous benefit to our clients because they lay a proper foundation from which to build.

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Bill and Melinda Gates Delivers New COVID-19 Funding

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed an additional $250 million to support the research, development, and equitable delivery of lifesaving tools in the global effort against COVID-19. Marking the end of a year focused on the scientific breakthroughs needed to end the pandemic, the foundation calls for global commitments to making these innovations available in 2021 to everyone who needs them.

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Can a USA Family Foundation Make Grants Outside the U.S.?

We at LAPA Fundraising are often asked, “Can we (a USA Family Foundation) make grants outside the U.S.? Family foundations can safely grant to non-501(c)(3) organizations outside the U.S. as long as they follow one of two special sets of procedures: expenditure responsibility or equivalency determination.

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Assessing Impact with General Operating Support Grants Debunking the Myths

Assessing Impact with General Operating Support Grants: Debunking the Myths

For several decades now, it’s been a common refrain from funders that choose not to provide general operating support (GOS) grants: we can’t make those grants because it’s too difficult to measure and assess their impact. In CEP’s 2006 report, In Search of Impact, the majority of foundation CEOs said program grants are more effective at assessing grantee results than GOS grants. Further, half of foundation leaders in that report preferred providing program grants, most commonly because they believed it was easier to assess their outcomes.

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