Learn what’s happening at the Foundation and in the communities where we work. Hear from staff and partners about their accomplishments and lessons learned along the way.
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In the fall of 2022, the Tower Foundation’s Community Experts Fund awarded a total of $200,000 to agencies that support programming for young people with intellectual disabilities and/or behavioral health challenges. The Fund was entirely designed and administered by a group of young adults that represented our funding regions and that had lived expertise across … Continued
When the Institute for Nonprofit Practice (INP) received our first grant from the Tower Foundation in 2009, little did we know that this investment would blossom into a transformative partnership spanning many years and multiple communities. Last month, while attending the graduation ceremony for INP’s first-ever Western New York cohort of Core Program graduates through … Continued
We are pleased to share an update from Think Bigger Do Good Policy Paper Series, a collaborative project of the Thomas Scattergood Foundation, Peg’s Foundation, the Peter & Elizabeth Tower Foundation, and the Patrick P. Lee Foundation. Each paper in this series identifies a specific challenge and recommends clear strategies to advance the delivery of mental … Continued
Reflecting on how things have gone is something we like to do about this time of year as the days grow shorter and nights grow longer. As 2022 winds down, and we reflect on our equity journey at the Foundation, it is hard not to notice all of the grief that we are carrying and … Continued
Actions and Voices In September, the hard work of the Tower Advisory team culminated in grant awards to 12 organizations in support of their mentoring and counseling work with youth. The ten members of the team independently reviewed a total of 26 applications, then came together to deliberate across two dynamic evening sessions. All the … Continued
Since November 2020, representatives from several grant partner organizations have met monthly to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in their work. This group, convened by Program Officers Chuck Colston and Megan MacDavey, has blossomed into a network that supports and learns from one another. After many months of meeting by Zoom, this group finally … Continued
Niko DelValle has been a member of the Tower Advisory Team since its first iteration in 2019. This year he joined the Tower Foundation as an intern to help support Advisory Team activities. Here Niko talks about his experience as an Advisory Team member. Back in 2019, I was at a bit of a crossroads … Continued
The Tower Foundation is shocked and saddened by the senseless mass shooting that took place in Buffalo, New York. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims’ families as they grieve the tragic loss of their loved ones. We are also deeply concerned about our community. Our staff members live in Buffalo and are still … 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
At the Tower Foundation, we are almost at the year and a half mark of a two-year pilot program looking at ways to assess the impact of general operating grants. We selected seven nonprofits with whom we had worked for some time to receive a grant of $70,000 ($35,000 for each of two years). More … Continued
