Earlier today, the Peter & Elizabeth Tower Foundation sent the following announcement out via our e-newsletter. It describes the Foundation’s response to the current political and funding climate, more specifically the uncertainty around federal funding and the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Dear Grant Partners and Community Members: You’ve no doubt been following … Continued
The 2024 Community Experts Team (CET) just came to a close, after holding its first in-person retreat in Buffalo, NY. The Community Experts Team is a group of young people from geographic areas that Tower funds: Erie and Niagara Counties in Western New York, and Barnstable, Dukes, Essex, and Nantucket Counties in Eastern Massachusetts who … Continued
The Tower Foundation has been on a five year-long journey to bring people with lived expertise in the Foundation’s areas of interest into our work. This includes young people in and around their twenties with intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, mental health challenges and substance use disorders. Below is an image of the Public Engagement Spectrum, … Continued
The ongoing mental health crisis is one of the most pressing challenges facing our society today. With over 50 percent of Americans seeking mental health care and 80 percent of students in the U.S. experiencing anxiety, the need for innovative, scalable solutions has never been more urgent. At The Brookline Center for Community Mental Health, … Continued
The last couple of posts in this series (here and here) have provided a high-level overview of Results-Based Accountability (RBA), and population accountability in particular. As a refresher, RBA is an ends-to-means approach to creating and measuring change at the community (i.e., population) and program (i.e., organization or service) levels. It’s built around goals (result … Continued
After a couple-year hiatus, I’m back to continue the refresher series on Results-Based Accountability (RBA)! In the last installment, we began exploring RBA and its five key questions, starting with, “How are we doing?” Answering this question requires zooming out and looking at community-level information, or population indicators. These population indicators provide a satellite view … Continued
The 2023 Community Experts Team just wrapped up its grant review, after coming together again with a mix of seasoned and brand-new members to determine the distribution of $215,000 to programs supporting youth. This year, the team was composed of 16 team members with lived experience, with origins from counties in Massachusetts and New York … Continued
About eight years ago, we shared a blog post outlining our approach to Results-Based Accountability (RBA) as a tool for evaluating our grants’ effectiveness. With the benefit of a few more years of working with and thinking about RBA, a refreshed introduction seemed to be in order. Beyond that, we’re now seeing how we can … Continued
Our 2021 funding cycles are now closed* and we know many of you are wondering what our 2022 grantmaking will look like. We’re still working on our 2022 grant guidelines and a finalized grantmaking calendar. Here’s what we can share now: We’ll be increasing the number of opportunities to apply for Strengthening Partner Capacity grants … Continued
In a previous blog post, we talked about how we’re beginning to operationalize the Tower Foundation’s emerging focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). One of the early steps we’ve taken is to get a better sense of the organizations we’re working with: how many are led (board and/or executive leadership), staffed, and serving people of … Continued
