Crime Grants

About the Henry T. Nicholas, III Foundation

The Foundation has been at the forefront nationally in supporting victims' rights, reflecting Dr. Nicholas' longstanding commitment to victims of violent crime. He has been a leader of the victims' rights movement since 1983, when his sister, Marsy, was murdered. He helped his parents found Justice for Homicide Victims, a leading non-profit organization that supports families of murder victims. Dr. Nicholas led the effort in 2008 to pass Marsy's Law, a state constitutional amendment that created a comprehensive Victims' Bill of Rights for California. Following this campaign, he formed Marsy's Law for All, an organization dedicated to enforcing the constitutional amendment, empowering victims' rights organizations, and creating a national movement to pass a victims' Bill of Rights as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Through Marsy's Law for All, the Foundation provides legal, technical, media and other resources to support victims' rights organizations and initiatives.

Read more about us.

Grant Information

The Henry T. Nicholas, III Foundation was created in 2006 with the vision of enabling and assisting communities and individuals to reach their highest potential. The Foundation is dedicated to improving lives through investment in Education, Youth Sports, Technology, Science, Medical Research, Victim's Rights, and National Defense.

Since its inception, the Foundation has provided more than $2.7 million to numerous public charities and non-profit organizations engaged in helping people build better lives for themselves and their neighbors.

The theme that unites the Foundation's various efforts into a single mission is investing in people and their futures:

• Grants are provided to help young people build strong educational and athletic foundations that will lead to healthy, productive and successful lives as adults.
• Advancement in science, technology and medicine is supported because these fields are the key to future health and prosperity for people and communities.
• Aid and support is provided to help violent crime victims and their families, and to assist the heroes who defend our nation and their families, because without safety and security there is no future.

FUNDER NOTE: The Foundation closed 2021 with a large increase in Grant requests. Times are so difficult for so many people across the globe and the complexities of COVID have stretched many organizations. We have always strived to be timely with responding to the many deserving organizations, but we have fallen behind on the grant process.

As a result, we are closing the application process to any new requests for the first quarter 2022. Any requests received will not be processed and will have to be resubmitted after March 31. This will allow us to work down the backlog of requests already received.

Mission

The Foundation was established in December 2013 by Kathryn B. McQuade, after retiring from 33 years of working in the business community. I was blessed to have been born into a loving middle class family. My father worked very hard to insure that all of his children were given an opportunity for a good education and my mother, “a stay at home Mom’ was always there for us. My world was safe and comfortable. My life is in stark contrast to how much of the rest of the world lives. I continue to read of the terrible injustices waged against women and children globally and hope that this foundation can provide them the opportunity and resources to succeed. We will support organizations that help us achieve our goal of Striving to make sustainable improvements in women and children’s rights education and welfare.

Kathryn McQuade Foundation Grant

The Foundation will make timely decisions on your grant request and provide clear communications on our expectations of reporting progress.

Women

The Foundation’s goal is to provide women assistance and provide them an opportunity to succeed. Assistance can take many forms, however our goal is to help them become self sufficient and enable them to lift themselves out of poverty and provide for their children. Access to education, job training and professional skills, even access to capital in order to build a business are possible ways we will consider helping women to succeed. Grant requests should focus on enabling the women to sustain financial independence.

We look forward to hearing of the many creative ways organizations are working on helping women succeed through out the world. To help women is to help their children and the communities they live in.

Children

Too many children in the US and across the world live in poverty and lack the access to education. Education and/or appropriate skills training are necessary to break the cycle of poverty and crime. While the assistance to women may take many forms, the foundation’s focus for children will target education and/ or skills training. The Foundation is open to many ideas on how to accomplish this goal and look forward to receiving proposals to help all children achieve their potential.

Advancing a New Vision of Justice

For over seventy years, Public Welfare Foundation has supported efforts to advance justice and opportunity for people in need. Today, our efforts focus on catalyzing a transformative approach to justice that is community-led, restorative, and racially just through investments in criminal justice and youth justice reforms.

Issue Areas: Adult Criminal Justice

Reforms at the edges are no longer enough. PWF is committed to funding new alternatives to the justice system in our targeted jurisdictions.

The scale and severity of America’s criminal justice system is a unique problem unmatched by any other developed nation. This crisis disproportionately impacts people of color, and costs the nation $80 billion annually in law enforcement spending and between $55 and $60 billion in lost annual Gross Domestic Product.

Our country’s over-reliance on mass incarceration is a failed experiment that adversely impacts communities and families, and has no positive effect on public safety. It’s a problem that can, and must, urgently be addressed with effective community alternatives. Community-based programs encourage innovative solutions that meet local priorities, foster collective action, and support new leaders who can spearhead efforts to make their own neighborhoods safer and stronger.

It is time to boldly reimagine our nation’s justice system.

Public Welfare Foundation makes grants primarily to groups that are working in its targeted jurisdictions to:

• Advance the redirection and prioritization of state and local resources toward targeted investments that support system-involved individuals in their communities, through research and strategic thought leadership.
• Reduce state incarceration levels and racial disparities through reforms in sentencing, charging, and supervision policies and procedures.

Sentencing Reform

Addressing our nation’s over incarceration crisis begins with advancing sentencing reforms that decrease state incarceration and reduce racial disparities.

Developing Policies & Procedures that Restore Dignity

Public Welfare Foundation aims to decrease state incarceration and reduce racial disparities through reforms in sentencing, charging, and supervision policies and procedures. We envision a future where unjust, racially-charged sentencing policies and procedures are replaced with effective measures that promote fairness, redemption and restoration.

Community Reinvestment

It’s time to shift power and resources from systems to communities.

Investing in Effective Community-Based Solutions

It is time to move from investing billions of dollars in failed prison models to investing in proven, effective community-based solutions. Research shows there is virtually no relationship between incarceration and crime rates – and that spending time in prison may actually increase the likelihood of a person’s return. By contrast, studies reinforce that local interventions have positive impacts on people and improve community safety.

The solutions to over incarceration lie with those who are most proximate to the issues. Heroes exist in the very neighborhoods that are most often relegated for being riddled with crime and violence. These models need to be resourced and replicated around the country.

Issue Area: Youth Justice

Prison is no place for kids. Investing in effective community-based visions of justice is good for kids, for families, for communities, and for public safety.

Today across the United States, thousands of children – disproportionately youth of color – languish in locked facilities. It is a sober reminder that our nation continues to choose to warehouse our most valuable asset: our children.

Children are too often referred to a punitive criminal justice system for misbehaviors that would more appropriately be handled within families, schools and communities. Despite research showing that incarceration leads to high youth recidivism rates, as well as poor education, employment, and health outcomes, prosecutors and the courts often fail to use alternatives to incarceration that have been shown to be more effective at rehabilitating young people. Youth of color are disproportionately likely to suffer the harms of these failed policies and practices.

There is a better way.

Public Welfare Foundation supports organizations working in its targeted jurisdictions to advance a fair and effective community-based vision of youth justice, with a focus on ending the criminalization and incarceration of youth of color. In particular, the Foundation makes grants to groups working to:

• Advance state policy reforms that dramatically restrict youth incarceration, abandon the youth prison model, and adopt community-based approaches for youth in the juvenile justice system;
• End the practice of trying, sentencing, and incarcerating youth in the adult criminal justice system; and
• Support innovative strategies to counter structural racism in the youth justice system, with a particular focus on front-end reforms.

Closing Youth Prisons

• Shifting resources from warehousing youth to investing in effective, community-based solutions.

Shifting Funds to Effective Community-Based Models

Given the grave damage incarceration does to youth and families, as well as its abysmal public safety outcomes, communities are calling for an end to the youth prison model. A national movement is advancing to shift resources away from simply warehousing kids and instead investing in communities to provide youth with the tools they need to succeed.

Public Welfare Foundation supports programs that advance state policy reforms to dramatically restrict youth incarceration, abandon the prison model, and adopt community-based approaches for youth in the juvenile justice system.

We don’t need more youth prisons, and we certainly don’t need to put more taxpayer dollars into a failed model. Working with our partners, Public Welfare Foundation is forging a new path forward that empowers communities to provide proven and effective supports for its young people

Racial Disparities

• Investing in innovative strategies to countering structural racism in the juvenile justice system.

Developing Racially-Just Youth Systems

Pervading our nation’s youth justice systems are gross racial and ethnic inequities that cannot be ignored. Despite similar offense rates across demographic groups, youth of color are more likely than their white peers to be referred to and incarcerated in the juvenile justice system, and to be tried and sentenced as adults.

Public Welfare Foundation supports innovative strategies to counter structural racism in the juvenile justice system, with a particular focus on front-end reforms.

Raising the Age

• Working to end the practice of trying, sentencing, and incarcerating youth in the adult criminal justice system.

Working to Treat Kids Like Kids

Public Welfare Foundation makes grants to groups who are working to end the practice of trying, sentencing, and incarcerating youth in the adult criminal justice system.

In the last two decades we have vastly increased scientific knowledge about adolescent brain development. However, in that same time we have accelerated the incarceration of children in direct contravention to what we have learned from the scientific community. Public Welfare Foundation is committed to ensuring that all adolescents and emerging adults are treated in ways that maximize their growth and development to help keep our communities just and safe.

Grants Overview

Public Welfare Foundation awards grants to nonprofits that honor the Foundation’s core values of racial equity, economic well-being, and fundamental fairness for all. The Foundation looks for strategic points where its funds can make a significant difference and improve lives through policy and system reform that results in transformative change.

Current focus areas include:

• Organizations developing innovative, transformative approaches to youth and adult criminal justice reform.
• Black-led movement building focused on dismantling the structures that have caused generations of harm to Black people, building power amongst local Black community members and advancing efforts to reinvest in communities.
• Organizations and projects focused on investing in community-based solutions that reduce the over-reliance on mass incarceration
• Reframing the narrative and fostering greater transparency and urgency around the U.S. criminal justice system through storytelling, journalism and other targeted efforts

Grant Types: How We Fund the Work

General Support Grants

General support grants are for day-to-day operating costs or to further the work of your organization. These grants are not earmarked for a particular program or project.

Program or Project Support Grants

Program or project support grants support a specific program or activity of the organization. These are restricted grants and must be used for that program or project.

Special Opportunities Grants

The Special Opportunities Program supports projects reflecting the Foundation’s mission and underlying values. These are one-time only grants that are especially timely and compelling. At times, this kind of grant serves as a laboratory for new ideas.

Note: Eligible agencies interested in being considered for a potential public safety-focused grant should contact their local Target store or distribution center’s Assets Protection (AP) team for a meeting to provide information around their program and overall funding request. There are two grant cycles, April and September.

Target Public Safety Grants

Creating safe and secure neighborhoods for our guests and team members is important to us. That’s why we provide public safety-focused funding.

Background

Our public safety grants are managed locally by our Target store and distribution center Assets Protection teams, and are awarded to eligible nonprofit organizations across the country to support crime prevention programs, community safety or youth engagement initiatives.

Funding Focus Areas

What are some of the public safety-related focuses funded through the CEF grant program?

The applying nonprofit organization must submit a proposal focused on crime prevention programs, community safety or youth engagement initiatives in order to qualify for a public safety-focused grant.

• Community safety initiatives and programs (e.g. bike helmet, car seat safety, child ID events)
• Community engagement crime prevention programs (e.g. educational materials, stranger danger, social media safety) 
• Youth programs that strengthen communities by fostering relationships between youth and public safety partners (classroom to careers, after school/summer programs, mentoring, back to school shopping)

Our Mission

The Sorenson Legacy Foundation is a non-profit corporation established by the late biotechnology pioneer and entrepreneur James LeVoy Sorenson and his wife, education philanthropist Beverley Taylor Sorenson, for the purpose of promoting charitable, artistic, religious, educational, literary and scientific endeavors. The foundation is based in Salt Lake City, Utah and is qualified under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

The Sorenson Legacy Foundation was created to improve the lives of others and the world in which we live. The foundation supports a wide range of endeavors, from community development and education to health care, scientific and artistic pursuits.

What We Fund

Education

As a teacher, Beverley believed the arts are essential to broadening our children’s minds starting in elementary. She helped promote legislation so Utahn children would be exposed to more of the arts. She saw the arts as equal in importance in the development and success of children as sciences and math. Education continues to be a focus area for the foundation because she was a champion for the cause.

The foundation continues to support seven major universities in the development of elementary arts studies. The goal of education funding will always be to improve the breadth and depth of the art education and experiences of young students. Whether that be by supporting elementary programs or teachers who develop the talents of students.

Health Care

Having never fulfilled his dream of becoming a doctor, James devoted much of his fortune to provide better medical assistance for saving lives and alleviating pain and suffering.

Grants are awarded to facilities that work toward improving these aims as well as medical research, medical technologies, and other innovations that provide safe health care and quick recoveries.

Innovation

James was always interested in how to improve products or processes and never settled for the status quo. His 60+ patents are proof of his desire to innovate areas in order to improve quality of life and equality of experience.

Grants are awarded to organizations that share the same passion for technological advances and care for humanity. Unlike the other areas funded, grants for innovation are open to any category or sector where innovative ideas and technologies can change the lives of people for the better.

Community

Both James and Beverley Sorenson were committed to improving the lives of those in their communities. From a young age, James served others including through a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The foundation recognizes the ways to help our communities are vast. Grants are given to programs that focus on protecting and preserving the environment, assist the disenfranchised of society, and promote understanding and tolerance in our world.

Projects

Ideas include, but are not limited to, projects and programs which: 

Education

• promote the development of the arts, including art education in schools
• assist promising young artists
• support performing arts organizations
• promote education and job training

Innovation

• enhance the quality of life of all humankind
• promote the development of science, culture, and recreation
• protect and enhance the environment
• promote the development of parks and green spaces

Health Care

• promote medical research
• develop innovative medical technologies for saving lives
• alleviate pain and suffering

Community

• encourage and support the long-term preservation of families and children;
• assist the disenfranchised of society, such as abused spouses and children
• promote community development and security and adequate and affordable housing
• promote law and order generally
• provide youth with alternatives to gangs, crime, and socially nonproductive behavior
• promote world peace and unity through greater understanding and tolerance
• advance the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Sociological Initiatives Foundation Grant

The Sociological Initiatives Foundation supports social change by linking research to social action. It funds research projects that investigate laws, policies, institutions, regulations, and normative practices that may limit equality in the South. It gives priority to projects that seek to address racism, xenophobia, classism, gender bias, exploitation, or the violation of human rights and freedoms. It also supports research that furthers language learning and behavior and its intersection with social and policy questions.

The Foundation supports research that focuses on improving services and systems and increasing positive social and physical conditions through:

• Policy development
• Placement and shaping of the policy agenda
• Policy adoption or implementation
• Policy blocking
• Increasing advocacy capacity and political influence
• Shaping public sentiment
• Addressing challenges related to language and literacy

Language issues include literacy, language loss and maintenance, language policy, language and national security, bilingualism, language and gender, language and law, language disabilities, language and health, language and education, different language cultures, and second language acquisition.

In the context of social and racial inequality dating back centuries, the Foundation supports projects that address institutional rather than individual or behavioral change. It seeks to fund research and initiatives that provide insight into sociological and linguistic issues that can help specific groups and or communities expand opportunities and challenge injustices.

Grant sizes normally range from $10,000 to $20,000. We look for projects that have an explicit research design and a concrete connection to public or community impact. It is not enough to just write a report or add a focus group to a social change project. The research should build an organization or constituency’s potential to expand public knowledge, impact policy, and create social change.

Current Thematic Focus: Violence and Society

 The Sociological Initiatives Foundation seeks to support community-based research in the Southern United States focused on the broad topic of violence and society. It invites requests to support research and advocacy efforts that move beyond the familiar conceptualizations of what violence is, how we experience it, how we talk about it, and how we advocate for freedom and safety.

Background

The Sociological Initiatives Foundation has supported a wide range of community-based research projects. Most of the activist-scholar projects have addressed structural race, class, and gender inequities. As the Foundation sharpened its emphasis on addressing systemic racism and racialized violence against Black people, however, it recognized a common but less-interrogated thread in many of the projects it has supported over the years. Many projects contend with the raw brutality of everyday violence in communities – a pressing reality that is often made invisible, individualized, or ignored as a form of structural oppression.

The scale and pervasiveness of this violence is staggering. With the rise of gun violence, gender-based violence, police-brutality, the carceral state, religious extremism, hate-crimes, and so on, there is an opportunity to develop more imaginative and innovative ways to understand these complex realities and create new spaces to investigate, theorize, and take action. More importantly, the various methodologies of community-based research present an opportunity to involve the people and communities most deeply affected by violence in shaping theory, narrative strategies, policies, and social movements.

What the Foundation looks for in a project:

The Foundation will continue to give priority to projects that link research with action and involve community members throughout.

It will invite proposals that communicate:

Insight. Challenges “common-sense” notions of activists, policymakers, and institutions.

Intersectionality. Addresses the multilevel and intersecting nature, and structural foundations of violence in our institutions – especially for racially marginalized women+ and girls+

A learning orientation. Builds critical literacies and new narratives/framing that illuminate the embeddedness of violence in legal, political, social, and cultural systems.

A civic agenda. Creates alternative public spheres for dialogue and deliberation about violence.

Urgency. Has a sense of urgency and express a readiness for strategic action; and addresses the lack of deep sociological engagement in questions of violence.

Some examples of desired applicants are:

• community-led academic partnerships
• advocacy or community groups that conduct research that can withstand challenge in academic and policy arenas
• academics allied with a constituency through their research