About The Chatlos Foundation

The Chatlos Foundation proclaims the Glory of God by funding nonprofit organizations doing work in the United States and around the globe. Support is provided to organizations currently exempt by the Internal Revenue Service of the United States.

Philosophy of Giving

Placement of an organization within our categories is determined by the organization’s overall mission rather than the project under consideration.

The Foundation’s areas of interest are:

Bible Colleges/Seminaries

Grants to Bible colleges and seminaries total 33% of Foundation distribution. History has shown grants in this category range in size from $5,000 to $20,000. To assure the Foundation that the philosophy of the institution is consistent with that of the Foundation, potential recipients are asked to sign our Statement of Faith.

Religious Causes

Grants to religious organizations total 30% of Foundation distribution. History has shown that grants in this category range in size from $5,000 to $15,000.

Liberal Arts Colleges

Grants to liberal arts colleges total 7% of Foundation distribution. History has shown that grants in this category range in size from $2,500 to $7,500. Priority consideration is given to private colleges.

Medical Concerns

Grants to medical organizations total 26% of Foundation distribution. History has shown that grants in this category range in size from $5,000 to $15,000.

Social Concerns

Grants to organizations involved in social concerns total 4% of distribution. History has shown that grants in this category range in size from $2,000 to $5,000. This category encompasses secular community programs which provide direct services such as child welfare, vocational training, prison alternatives, concerns for the aged and disabled, and men, women and families in crisis.

Giving Information

Program support remains a current priority for the Foundation.

On an initial basis, the Foundation tends to fund requests for amounts less than $10,000. 

It is important to note that it is not our intention to become a part of an annual budget. We expect the projects we fund to become independent of The Chatlos Foundation. 

Many organizations are worthy of funding, however, our funding is limited. Applicants should understand that rejection of the proposal in no way signals rejection of the proposer. 

The large number of requests we receive causes us to decline many proposals which are worthy of attention and funding. 

NOTE:  This program is NOT a grant, but rather a matching funds program.

About Elevation

Mission

Traditionally, technology and nonprofits have existed in separate worlds. At Elevation, we are bridging this longstanding gap by combining these two ostensibly different industries into one. We believe that technology is a catalyst that can propel nonprofits into making a greater impact. Our team at Elevation is that bridge and our solutions are the driving forces behind nonprofits generating quantifiable change and inspiring others to do the same. This idea is the foundation of how we do business every day.

Read more about mission & values here. 

Our Approach

At Elevation, we are united under one goal – provide quality digital solutions to nonprofit organizations so they can continue generating measurable change in their communities. In order to fulfill this mission, we have fostered a design process that is customized, flexible, and results-driven. Our clients receive fully functioning, efficient websites, and more. Your website is a tool and an integral part of fulfilling your nonprofit’s mission. When developed with the right team and ideas, you’ll be able to reach broader audiences and transmit a greater positive impact.

Read more about Elevation's team & clients here.

1 for 1 Matching Fund

For every dollar your nonprofit invests in Elevation’s in-house services, we will match that dollar with one of our own.

Born out of our mission to elevate nonprofits’ impact, our 1 for 1 Matching Fund helps us to provide otherwise out-of-reach services to eligible nonprofit partners.

What is the 1 for 1 match?

Making professional design & web services affordable

For every dollar your nonprofit invests in Elevation’s in-house services, we will match that dollar with one of our own.

Born out of our mission to elevate nonprofits’ impact, our 1 for 1 Matching Funds program helps us provide otherwise out-of-reach services to eligible nonprofit partners.

How can your organization participate?

If you are a nonprofit with a project and would like to apply for assistance, please complete our brief online application.

Are there Additional Requirements? 

We work with all sectors, from religious to environmental, provided that their missions align with the values listed on Elevation's "About Us" page. For logistical purposes, we do rely on a point of contact based in the US, Canada, or Europe, but past recipient organizations have been located across the Americas and Africa as well.

Which Projects are Eligible? 

• Website Design & Re-design in WordPress
• Copywriting
• CRM Integrations in WordPress
• Branding & Graphic Design
• Marketing & Google Grants
• On-going WordPress Support
• Website Hosting

Is there a maximum benefit? 

We match what you raise, up to a 50K project. (For a 50K project, we’ll fund up to 25K. For a 16K  project, we fund up to 8K, etc.) We consider projects over 50K to be appropriate for well-established organizations and thus are not eligible for this program. We still strive to provide all nonprofits with the best results for every dollar they spend.

Why do we need other funding for the first half of our project?

We understand that nonprofits are under-resourced. We include a stipulation about additional funding to support an organization's commitment to finishing a project, which we have found to work best when additional parties are invested. If you feel the project minimums are unachievable for your organization but you can provide empirical data showing strong community support, please include that information in your application.

What is the timeframe for projects? 

The minimum timeframe for projects is 4 months, though most projects take 5 to 6 months to complete. Projects that take longer than 6 months due to delays from the client incur an extraordinary fee.

What is the time commitment required from our staff? 

On average, website clients can expect their staff to dedicate 10 labor hours each week in order to make adequate progress. The amount of time required from your staff members depends on how much they split up the work and how much support your organization has for creating content, writing copy, and accessing hosting and integration information from the other technologies you use. Significant, actionable progress on a project must be made within two weeks of a request from the Project Manager, or your project will be placed on hold.

Entergy’s Open Grants Program focuses on improving communities as a whole. We look for giving opportunities in the areas of arts and culture, education and workforce development, poverty solutions and social services, healthy families, and community improvement.

Arts and Culture

The arts are expressions of ourselves – our heritage, feelings and ideas. To cultivate that, we support a diverse range of locally based visual arts, theater, dance and music institutions. Our long-term goal is to increase the access to contemporary art for a wider public, including children and the financially disadvantaged.

Community Improvement/EnrichmentEntergy supports community-based projects that focus community enrichment and improvement. A few examples include civic affairs, blighted housing improvements, and neighborhood safety. By giving to communities in this way, we actually help them become more self-sufficient.Healthy FamiliesChildren need a good start to grow into healthy, well-adjusted adults. With that in mind, we give to programs that have a direct impact on children educationally and emotionally. We’re also interested in family programs, like those that better prepare parents to balance the demands of work and home. The amount and nature of an organization’s request will determine which type of grant the organization would need to apply for.

Global Impact Cash Grants

Cisco welcomes applications for Global Impact Cash Grants from community partners around the world who share our vision and offer an innovative approach to a critical social challenge.

We identify, incubate, and develop innovative solutions with the most impact. Global Impact Cash Grants go to nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that address a significant social problem. We’re looking for programs that fit within our investment areas, serve the underserved, and leverage technology to improve the reach and efficiency of services. We accept applications year-round from eligible organizations. An initial information form is used to determine whether your organization will be invited to complete a full application.

Social Investment Areas

At Cisco, we make social investments in three areas where we believe our technology and our people can make the biggest impact—education, economic empowerment, and crisis response, the last of which incorporates shelter, water, food, and disaster relief. Together, these investment areas help people overcome barriers of poverty and inequality, and make a lasting difference by fostering strong global communities.

Education Investments

Our strategy is to inclusively invest in technology-based solutions that increase equitable access to education while improving student performance, engagement, and career exploration. We support K-12 solutions that emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) as well as literacy. We also consider programs that teach environmental sustainability, eliminate barriers to accessing climate change education, and invite student engagement globally to positively affect the environment.

What we look for:

• Innovative early grade solutions using the internet and technology to bridge the barriers preventing access to education for underserved students globally.
• Solutions that positively affect student attendance, attitudes, and behavior while inspiring action by students to improve learning outcomes, whether they participate in person, online, or in blended learning environments. 
• Solutions with high potential to replicate and scale globally, thereby increasing the availability of evidence-based solutions that support student-centricity, teacher capacity in the classroom, and increased parental participation to help students learn and develop.

Note: Cisco does not provide direct funding to schools.

Economic Empowerment

Our strategy is to invest in early stage, tech-enabled solutions that provide equitable access to the knowledge, skills, and resources that people need to support themselves and their families toward resilience, independence, and economic security.

Our goal is to support solutions that benefit individuals and families, and that contribute to local community growth and economic development in a sustainable economy.

We target our support in three interconnected areas:

• Skills development to help job seekers secure dignified employment and long-term career pathways in technology or other sectors, including environmental sustainability/green jobs.
• Inclusive entrepreneurship with small businesses as engines of local growth as well as high growth potential start-ups as large-scale job creators nationally and internationally, in technology or other sectors, including environment sustainability/green businesses.
• Banking the unbanked through relevant and affordable financial products and capacity building services.

Cisco Crisis Response

We seek to help overcome the cycle of poverty and dependence and achieve a more sustainable future through strategic investments. We back organizations that successfully address critical needs of underserved communities, because those who have their basic needs met are better equipped to learn and thrive.

What we look for:

• Innovative solutions that increase the capacity of grantees to deliver their products and services more effectively and efficiently
• Design and implementation of web-based tools that increase the availability of, or improve access to, products and services that are necessary for people to survive and thrive
• Programs that increase access to clean water, food, shelter, or disaster relief and promote a more sustainable future for all
  • By policy, relief campaigns respond to significant natural disaster and humanitarian crises as opposed to those caused by human conflict. Also by policy, our investments in this area do not include healthcare solutions.

Lilly Endowment receives a few thousand grant requests each year, but we can fund only a small percentage of many worthwhile proposals. These guidelines, formulated over the years by our founders and the Endowment's Board of Directors, govern our grantmaking decisions.

Our Work: Religion

Our primary aim in religion is to deepen and enrich the religious lives of American Christians, principally by supporting efforts that enhance the vitality of congregations. We seek to ensure that congregations have a steady stream of wise, faithful and well-prepared leaders. We also support efforts that help Christians draw on the wisdom of their theological traditions as they strive to understand and respond to contemporary challenges and live their faith more fully. In addition, we work to foster public understanding about religion and help lift up in fair and accurate ways the contributions that people of diverse religious faiths make to our greater civic well-being.

Strengthening Pastoral Leadership

We believe that the long-term vitality of congregations depends on excellent pastoral leadership, and our grants seek to ensure that congregations have a steady stream of wise, faithful and well-prepared leaders. By drawing upon research and insights from conversations with thoughtful religious leaders, we strive to support efforts that present promising responses to challenges facing pastoral leadership and Christian congregations. We pay particular attention to key moments along the arc of a pastor’s ministerial career – from a young person’s wrestling with a call to ministry to an experienced pastor’s seeking to sustain excellence.

Deepening Christian Life

We seek to help American Christians live their faith fully and well through grants that support the exploration of compelling questions facing Christian congregations. How can Christians draw more fully on the wisdom of scriptural and theological traditions to understand and respond to contemporary challenges? How can Christian faith be nurtured throughout life and passed to new generations? How are pastors, theologians and others responding to the influence of rapid cultural change on all aspects of life, including faith?

Enhancing Congregational Vitality

We believe that vibrant congregations enrich the lives of their members and those they serve through mission outreach in their communities and throughout the world. We, therefore, support efforts to enhance the vitality of congregations and address the most pressing challenges facing them. In so doing, we focus on questions such as the following:

What makes Christian congregations vibrant, effective communities of faith? How can congregations be renewed and strengthened in the face of contemporary social change? How can congregational leadership become stronger and more sustainable? How can practices for promoting congregational vitality be shared among diverse congregations?

Strengthening Religious Institutions and Networks

We believe that institutions beyond local congregations are essential to their vitality and the success of their ministries. These institutions and the networks to which they belong are addressing important issues facing Christianity.

How can theological schools, colleges and universities and judicatories help strengthen pastors and prepare a new generation of Christian leaders? How can these organizations collaborate more effectively with each other and with congregations to enhance and sustain the mission of Christian churches and parishes? How can various Christian institutions address the economic challenges facing seminarians, pastors and congregations?

Improving the Public Understanding of Religion

Religion plays a critical role in shaping American life. Through grants on an invitational basis to major cultural institutions and nonprofit news and media organizations around the country, we seek to foster public understanding about religion and lift up in fair and accurate ways the contributions that people of all faiths and diverse religious communities make to our greater civic well-being.

What We Fund

Our religion grantmaking aims to deepen and enrich the religious lives of American Christians, principally by supporting efforts that enrich the vitality of congregations. We believe that the long-term health of congregations depends on excellent pastoral leadership, and our grants seek to ensure that congregations have a steady stream of wise, faithful and well-prepared leaders. We also support efforts that help Christians draw on the wisdom of their theological traditions as they strive to understand and respond to contemporary challenges and live out their faith more fully. Much of this work centers on the theological concept of vocation and focuses on helping Christians, especially youth and young adults, discover how God calls them to lead lives of meaning and purpose.

In addition, we believe that religion plays a critical role in shaping American life. Through grants to major cultural institutions and 501(c) (3) news and media organizations, we seek to foster public understanding about religion and lift up in fair and accurate ways the contributions that people of all faiths and diverse religious communities make to our greater civic well-being.Our grantmaking in religion is national in scope

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 U.S. 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

NOTE: Applicants will need to pass an Eligibility Quiz on the platform before they are granted access to the application.

Who We Are

The Unitarian Universalist Funding Program (UUFP) is a denominational grantmaking program of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Inspired by the richness and diversity of our liberal religious tradition, the mission of the UUFP is to promote the influence of Unitarian Universalist principles through grantmaking. 

Grants are made that: 

• Support the work of social justice. 
• Strengthen Unitarian Universalist institutions.
• Transform gratitude for being into generosity of living.
• Make Unitarian Universalism more visible in the world.

Fund for a Just Society

Makes grants to nonprofit organizations addressing issues of social and economic justice. Grants are given to projects that use community organizing to bring about systemic change.

Funding Priorities 

Priority is given to active, specific campaigns to create change in the economic, social, and political structures that affect their lives. We expect the organization’s infrastructure, including leadership, membership and systems of accountability to be developed by the time of the application. We welcome projects that are less likely to receive conventional funding because of the innovative or challenging nature of the work, the economic and social status of the constituency, or the geographic location of the work. Please be concrete; spell out your plans. Don’t say you will “empower people,” tell us what actions you will take to create systematic change.

Helping the Disadvantaged Become Self-Reliant

Gupta Family Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, USA. Our mission is to support organizations that provide focused intervention in the lives of people who have been disadvantaged in some way to help them become self-reliant. We take a very broad view of “disadvantage” to include anything that holds a person back from realizing their potential, such as poverty, physical or mental disability, social alienation, etc. The foundation also supports relief agencies that serve people affected by emergencies such as natural disasters.

The foundation evaluates and awards annual and multi-year grants ranging from $5,000 to over $250,000 (USD). Our focus is on funding smaller organizations all around the world that are led by individuals with a deep personal commitment to their missions. 

Our selection criteria include:

• Mission alignment
• The organization is run by the founder or, if not, by a successor who embodies the original inspiration, passion and commitment of the founder.
• At least 90% of grant monies reaches the intended beneficiaries.
• The organization is non-sectarian, i.e.,
  • It does not, directly or indirectly, support or condone the proselytization of any religion,
  • It is not supported by or affiliated to a religious organization.