This post represents the renewal of a blog series dating back to 2013. Four times between 2013 and 2019, we looked at a batch of grants that had recently closed — anywhere between 22 and 54 of them — to ask the question: Are we making effective grants? A resulting blog post assessed the overall … Continued
About three-quarters of parents in Eastern Massachusetts communities disagreed that it would be best for persons with intellectual disabilities to live and work in special communities (76%, up from 46% just two years ago). While the majority of Western New York parents report that youth with intellectual disabilities do not receive equal education opportunities, about … Continued
Buffalo, N.Y., May 20, 2024 – The Board of Trustees of The Peter & Elizabeth Tower Foundation has appointed three new members and includes Allen Paul Booker, Dr. Marie A. Cannon, and Dr. Jacqueline Hall. The new members will each serve an initial one year term with the private family foundation that serves Western New … Continued
At the Tower Foundation, we are excited to advance our participatory grantmaking agenda on several fronts in 2024. Before previewing these in this post, I offer a definition of participatory philanthropy from the Fund for Shared Insight.. Participatory Philanthropy: A philanthropy practice that explicitly includes the participation of community members with lived expertise in a … Continued
On November 20, 2023, the Tower Foundation hosted an online conversation about the intersection of incarceration and substance use. Panelists from several of our grant partners were invited to discuss the ways in which their work with recently incarcerated youth is affected by substance use disorders within this population. Rates of substance use disorder are … Continued
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
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
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
