Blog posts in this space have traced the evolution of the Tower Foundation Advisory Team in some detail. In the fall of 2019, we told you about the initial formation of a seven-member advisory team, made up of young Western New Yorkers with intellectual disabilities. This fun and dynamic group helped us review applications in … Continued
One of the aspirational goals for our mental health grantmaking at the Peter & Elizabeth Tower Foundation is pretty simple: Stigma related to mental illness is eliminated. The recently launched TowerDATA Dashboard looks at community data that may be able to tell us if the counties where we fund are seeing movement towards a reduction … Continued
In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, we would like to take an opportunity to spotlight the work of the Children’s Mental Health Campaign (CMHC), a Massachusetts-based initiative. CMHC was created in 2007 as a partnership between the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCC) and Boston Children’s Hospital. The idea was … Continued
The focus of this blog post is a webinar on the COVID-19 vaccines as they affect people with disabilities in Massachusetts. For more of a Western New York perspective, take a look at this webinar recording from the Developmental Disabilities Alliance of Western New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4_mz_pO3rk On Tuesday, March 9th, the Center for Public Representation … Continued
About five years ago, the Ford Foundation made public a commitment to award 40% of its grant dollars as unrestricted, general operating awards. They made this move in the face of mounting advocacy for loosening philanthropy’s widespread proclivity for tying grant dollars to specific programs or capital projects. Groups like GEO (Grantmakers for Effective Organizations) … Continued
We asked our current grant partners to tell us about the challenges to their organization stemming from the COVID-19 crisis. Responses to the survey were timely, detailed, open, and sobering. Across the board, providers are working tirelessly to maintain as much continuity of care as they can. Some of the reported issues are captured here. Rapid … Continued
Part 2 [This second (and final) installment takes a look at recent Tower grants and their impact on the target population, grantee organization, and the field at large. This analysis represents 44 grants that were closed between June 2018 and December 2019.] Once again, we wanted to take a look at the somewhat broader impact … Continued
Part 1 [This installment of a two-part series looks at the performance of Tower grants when measured against specific project goals; Part 2 will look at the broader impact of the same grants.] About every year and half or so, we take a look at the latest cluster of closed grants and assess their aggregate … Continued
This May I attended a GEO conference in Seattle, Washington with a singular focus on the role of learning in philanthropy. Things kicked off with a call to honor the land where we were gathered and acknowledge that its indigenous people (the Suquamish, Duwamish, and many others) were harshly treated and marginalized by Seattle’s white … Continued
On a chilly November afternoon, I had the pleasure of attending Arc Tank 2.0 at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum on UMASS’s Boston campus. This is the second year of the event, hosted by Northeast Arc (NeArc)¹, and loosely based on the tv show Shark Tank. Organizations that serve people with intellectual disabilities or … Continued
