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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At long last, I’m pleased to announce that the Tower Foundation has launched its new grants portal. We hope that it will be easier and more pleasant for you to see what grant opportunities are available, apply for grants, check on grant payments, request technical assistance, and share stories about your work. If you had … Continued
We’re very excited about the transition to our new grants portal, but I’m sorry to say that we’re running a bit further behind schedule than we’d imagined. While we expected to “flip the switch” last week, it’s actually going to happen this Thursday. Here are a couple of things you need to know: If you … Continued
A little over a year ago, the Tower Foundation began to use a racial equity lens to reflect on our work: How can we be a more equitable grantmaker? (You can read more about this journey here.) While we focus on young people living with intellectual disabilities, substance use disorders, learning disabilities, and mental health … Continued
For this blog, we invited Anne Showers, a grant partner and CEO of Accessible Academics to describe the impact of COVID-19 on her organization and ways in which they were able to adapt to new realities. Accessible Academics, based in Buffalo NY, works with students that have a range of learning challenges, providing academic and … 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
For a little less than a year, the staff at the Tower Foundation has been exploring diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as it relates to our work. This post is the first of several in which we will share about our path and process, some of the challenges we have experienced, and the opportunities that … Continued
Last October, we wrote a blog about the Advisory Team of young people with intellectual disabilities that helped us review grants from the fall 2019 grant cycle. In that blog, we focused on the creation of the team, the process of coming together to review grants, and the great feedback that we got. The Advisory Team … Continued
Just about every website you visit these days has a popover window, a banner, or some other techie web-gizmo to make sure you know about the host organization’s COVID-19 response. Time to add our response to the mix. With a number of currently running grants and an upcoming grant deadline, we’ve tried to slow down … 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
Back in 2012 the Foundation’s Trustees and staff adopted a Results-Based Accountability (RBA) approach to understanding our grant making impact on the fields and communities we serve. As part of adopting RBA, we identified a total of 19 community-wide goals across the issue areas we support (if you’re curious, you can find them on page … Continued
