Mission

To encourage human development in West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania through strategically placed charitable resources.

Guiding Principles

The following principles guide the Foundation’s grants programs in those regions: 

• We honor Michael and Sarah Benedum’s belief in “helping people help themselves,” and we seek opportunities to cultivate the creativity of people and communities. 
• We nurture leadership within the communities we serve, and we participate in leadership when it adds value.
• We encourage planning, projects and programs that cross geographical and political boundaries so that access to services and economic growth is maximized.
• We expect collaboration among the public, private and nonprofit sectors in order to leverage the resources that each can bring to common concerns.
• We strive to advance innovative practices that demonstrate measurable and sustainable benefit.
• We seek projects that contribute to advancement in public policy.

What We Fund

In keeping with the wishes of Michael and Sarah Benedum, the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation is a regional philanthropy focusing on West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania. The Foundation generally invests two-thirds of its grant dollars in West Virginia and one-third in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

The Foundation serves the entire state of West Virginia. In Southwestern Pennsylvania, the service area includes Allegheny, Washington, Greene, and Fayette Counties. This four-county area is a natural connector between Pittsburgh and West Virginia and contains rural communities that may benefit from the Benedum Foundation’s experiences in West Virginia. However, the Foundation recognizes that economic regions do not follow political boundaries, and therefore, the Foundation both encourages projects that cross state lines, and supports economic initiatives that benefit the multi-state economy centered on Pittsburgh.

However, the Foundation recognizes that economic regions do not follow political boundaries, and therefore, the Foundation both encourages projects that cross state lines, and supports economic initiatives that benefit the multi-state economy centered on Pittsburgh.

Program Areas: Education and Economic Development

The Foundation makes grants in two program areas that span both states: Education and Economic Development

Education

The Benedum Foundation seeks to promote successful learning through the formal education system. Academic achievement and preparation for the 21st-century workforce are the ultimate objectives of this program.

The Foundation places a high priority on teacher quality and the most advanced instructional tools. Because schools do not function in isolation, the Foundation also looks to the resources of community organizations, business, and higher education to reinforce the learning objectives of the classroom. In preparation for the rising demands of the workplace, the Foundation recognizes the need for all students to enter some form of post-secondary education.

Although the Foundation is interested in any significant opportunity to improve the education system, specific areas of interest include:

• Programs that improve teacher quality through professional development and innovative instructional strategies.
• Arts education, the integration of arts into other disciplines, and the partnership of community arts groups and higher education with the PreK-12 education system.
• Career education that aligns secondary and post-secondary programs to high-demand, high-wage occupations.

Economic Development

Innovation will be the cornerstone of the future success of the economy in West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania. The Foundation supports economic development activities based upon the region’s strengths in research, technology, and advanced manufacturing.

The Foundation’s agenda seeks to promote regional planning and cooperation, recognizing that with respect to any endeavor, “region” should mean whatever area is most appropriate to optimize the available opportunity, without reference to historic, geographic, or political boundaries. The expected outcomes of the Foundation’s Economic Development grants are the creation and growth of innovative, wealth-producing businesses and high-quality jobs.

In addition, many of the communities in the region served by the Foundation are rural, and enjoy abundant natural assets that provide economic opportunities that complement centers of technology-based growth. The Foundation supports efforts to advance agriculture, outdoor recreation, artisanship, and cultural tourism. Specific areas of Foundation interest include:

• Promotion of entrepreneurship.
• Projects that promote technology-based economic development.
• Programs to promote the growth and accessibility of new capital for businesses in distressed communities and areas of high unemployment.

NOTE: Highmark prefers to have requests submitted at least 6 weeks in advance of the start of the program to allow for proper review and approvals, but will endeavor to address requests submitted with less than 6 weeks until the start of the program.

About Us

One of America's leading health insurance organizations and an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Highmark Inc. (the Health Plan) and its affiliated health plans (collectively, the Health Plans) work passionately to deliver high-quality, accessible, understandable, and affordable experiences, outcomes, and solutions to customers. Highmark Inc. and its Blue-branded affiliates proudly cover the insurance needs of approximately 7 million members in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and West Virginia. Its diversified businesses serve group customer and individual needs across the United States through dental insurance and other related businesses.

Highmark Corporate Giving

The decades-long legacy of Highmark includes direct financial support to improve the quality of life in the communities we serve. Today, our corporate giving benefits hundreds of organizations across our service area.

The Highmark Bright Blue Futures charitable giving and community involvement program's goal is to ensure healthier, brighter, stronger futures for all. Our focus is improving equitable access to care, quality of life and economic resilience in the communities we serve.

Focus Areas

We aspire to improve outcomes in two critical areas: Community Health and Community Economic Resilience.

Community Health

Reducing health inequities and disparities among our targeted populations through novel solutions and strong partnerships go a long way toward reversing societal trends and lifting up those in need.

Our strategy is supported by five pillars that each play an important role in promoting the wellbeing of all:

• Access to Care
  • Highmark Bright Blue Futures strives to ensure that everyone in our communities, regardless of their location, income, or other factors, has equitable access to preventative care, disease-specific support, and health literacy programs.
• Economic Stability for Individuals and Families
  • We work to reduce the hardships that keep people from achieving financial security, such as food insecurity, housing instability, and unemployment.
• Social and Community Context
  • Our programs related to physical activity and social connections encourage individuals to improve their health and quality of life through regular physical activity, and to seek out relationships that nurture their emotional, psychological and physical wellness, and growth.
• Education Access
  • Through training and educational opportunities in healthcare and medical fields, as well as providing scholarships to higher education programs, Highmark Bright Blue Futures is dedicated to helping students gain the skills and knowledge they need to pursue and achieve their career goals.
• Neighborhood and Built Environment
  • The built environment plays a crucial role in the health and safety of communities.
  • Beyond just providing physical spaces, the built environment can be used to create programs and resources that can help to address issues that have a direct impact on the physical, mental, and emotional health of community members.

Community & Economic Resilience

Even during periods of upheaval and change, we were successful in improving economic wellbeing and quality of life in communities of all sizes.

In our efforts to support their communities and economic resilience, we:

• invested resources in moving diversity, equity and inclusion forward in a transformative way.
• provided a network of direct services to those in need.
• helped students and jobseekers prepare for success.
• improved the standards of living and fostering wellbeing.
• brought joy to and built bridges between cultures.

About Us

Manufacturing PA is part of Governor Wolf’s Jobs that Pay Initiative, which supports Pennsylvania’s manufacturing community by offering targeted programs and services through the PA Department of Community and Economic Development and its strategic partners. Training-to-Career Grants support projects that result in short-term work-readiness training, entry-level job placement, or the advancement of the manufacturing industry.

The Department of Community and Economic Development’s mission is to encourage the shared prosperity of all Pennsylvanians by supporting good stewardship and sustainable development initiatives across our commonwealth. With a keen eye toward diversity and inclusiveness, we act as advisors and advocates, providing strategic technical assistance, training, and financial resources to help our communities and industries flourish.

Manufacturing PA Training-to-Career Grant program

The Manufacturing PA Training-to-Career Grant program will not duplicate existing programs such as WEDNet and Next Generation Industry Partnerships but is designed to help companies identify and train a skilled workforce for existing or near future open positions, engage youth or those with barriers in awareness building activities of career opportunities in manufacturing, and or advance capacity for local or regional manufacturers

The grant funds may be used for professional services/consultants, internships, equipment purchase, shop modifications, program development, marketing, domestic travel, and salaries and fringes.

McElhattan Foundation Grants

Welcome to the McElhattan Foundation. We are a Pittsburgh-based grantmaking foundation.

Our mission is preserving and enhancing human life, and we are working toward this by focusing our grantmaking on four program areas: 

Workplace Safety 

The Foundation's interest in preventing death and serious injury in the workplace stems from the family's company, Industrial Scientific Corporation, which manufactures life-saving gas-monitoring devices. The McElhattan family is deeply committed to ending death on the job by 2050, and we expect the majority of our grant budget will be dedicated to this effort. We are especially interested in innovative safety technology, including virtual and augmented reality. 

We do not fund applications from nonprofits for employee training or installing/buying safety equipment; we also do not fund road safety initiatives. If you've found us and are seeking funding for any of these things, we wish you the best of luck-- our team is small and it's necessary for us to stay within our particular areas of focus in this program area.

Education

Please note: If you plan to apply for a grant in our Education program area, please schedule a 15-minute meeting with our program officer.

The McElhattan Foundation believes that learning - about oneself and the world around us - is at the core of human life. After all, we learn throughout our entire lives, and in many different settings from school to home and everything in between. Learning brings joy, frustration, resilience, understanding, and purpose to our lives. Unfortunately, many in our region, specifically children living in poverty and children of color, do not have equitable access to high-quality learning opportunities. There are complex and systemic issues of racial and economic injustice at work. To address these issues, our grantmaking is focused on high-need, high-impact areas. Through careful consideration of evidence and urgency, we make grants to support out-of-school time learning and innovative approaches to expand educator diversity. 

Out-of-school-time (OST) Learning  - Research shows that interest-driven experiences in OST settings are key to unlocking the critical learning and life skills that help children to flourish. Because learning does not stop when the school day ends, we support high-quality afterschool, summer, and other informal learning experiences that take place outside the classroom. We fund hands-on learning experiences where youth can connect to positive adult mentors, feel safe to try new things, and have the opportunity to hone new skills. Through our funding, we work to strengthen and expand OST learning in the Pittsburgh region to ensure equitable access for all children.

We prioritize funding for programs that:

• primarily serve children living in poverty and/or children of color; 
• are community-based, rather than operated by schools; 
• primarily serve children in grades K-8; and 
• operate with dependable consistency and high frequency.

We are particularly interested in funding organizations that demonstrate a commitment to implementing critical quality standards, including:  

• social-emotional learning and skill development;
• positive relationship development among youth and with trusted adult mentors;
• youth-centered approaches that help individuals build on their strengths and talents; and 
• strong partnerships with families and schools.

The McElhattan Foundation aims to provide flexible support to grant recipients in the OST area and will direct the majority of our giving through general operating grants. We also will prioritize organizations with annual operating budgets of $10 million or less.

End-of-Life Planning and Care

The McElhattan Foundation believes it is possible for most people to have a higher quality of life at the end of life. Grants in our End-of-Life Planning and Care program area will support initiatives in three strategic areas: Awareness and Documentation, Caregiver/Provider Training and Support, and Technological Innovation. As always, we seek to fund changemakers—visionary leaders and strong teams who will create dramatic, measurable improvement in how patients and their families experience the inevitable process of dying.

• AWARENESS & DOCUMENTATION - We will support initiatives that educate and empower our community—Western Pennsylvania—about end-of-life decision-making, including clarifying the option of hospice care. We are open to funding broad awareness campaigns as well as targeted efforts aimed at reaching specific segments of the population, especially underserved groups. Once an individual understands their end-of-life options and decides upon their preferences, it’s essential for that person to make their wishes known, in advance and in writing, to their loved ones and medical providers. We will support initiatives designed to make recording and sharing this information easier.
• CAREGIVER/PROVIDER TRAINING & SUPPORT - We support initiatives that offer resources, such as respite care, practical training, and counseling, to family and other nonprofessional caregivers. We support programs that train or retrain professional end-of-life care providers—nurses, doctors, social workers, home healthcare aides, etc.—for careers that pay family-sustaining wages. We are particularly interested in improving communication skills around end-of-life care for providers, and in high-quality home-based care. This work too will be focused in Western Pennsylvania.
• TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION - We believe technology can play a role in improving the “quality of death” for many people. Perhaps there is an application for existing technology, like augmented reality, in training caregivers, or perhaps someone can use emerging technology to prevent pressure sores. We would love to see this innovation begin in Pittsburgh, but we are open to applications from end-of-life tech innovators anywhere in the U.S. (To clarify: the bar here is high. We are not funding requests to purchase equipment like VR headsets, iPads, etc. We are looking for game-changing new ideas that could move the entire field of end-of-life care forward.)

Community Development in Knox & Franklin, PA

The McElhattan family's roots are in Knox and Franklin, PA, and we would like to see those communities thrive. We aim to support locally-led initiatives that improve residents' job opportunities, health, safety, and general quality of life. We have, for example, contributed to the renovation of Miller-Sibley Park and the renovation of the Franklin YMCA, and have funded the Knox Area Ambulance Company and the Knox Volunteer Fire Department.

Organizations that serve Knox and/or Franklin as part of a larger geographical service area are eligible to apply for funding, but in your LOI, please estimate what percentage of funds will be spent specifically on community development in Knox and/or Franklin. 

As a family foundation in Pittsburgh, PA, our philanthropic traditions are well rooted in our continued support of organizations that foster transformative programs which best serve the local community as a whole in the areas of arts and culture, education, environmental, health and medical, human services, and religion.

Even though the Snee-Reinhardt Charitable Foundation encompasses many broad areas of concern, or categories, there is no one area deemed more important than the next. Nevertheless, the Foundation has found it beneficial underwriting grants that are tangible in nature or serve a higher number of individuals within the community and surrounding areas. The Foundation continually aids organizations that are endlessly striving to serve the community in various ways such as improving social conditions, expanding education, and working to better the environment.

Category Definitions

The Snee-Reinhardt Charitable Foundation’s Board of Directors has designated several areas of concern comprised of specific intentions.

• Arts/Culture: Performing arts, humanities, media and communications, multipurpose museums, public broadcasting, and historical preservations.
• Education: Promotional programs for elementary, secondary and vocational systems, colleges/universities, graduate programs, adult and multipurpose libraries.
• Environmental: Support of natural resources, beautification programs, pollution control, environmental education, and horticultural/botanical programs.
• Health/Medical: Rural health care, crisis intervention, special programs in health centers, and prevention/treatment of specific diseases.
• Human Services: Youth development and recreation, disaster relief, employment training/ placement, multipurpose agencies, and abuse prevention.
• Religion: The theological education and ecumenical programs as well as the mission of many churches, synagogues, and religious charities.
• Miscellaneous: Because every grant cannot be included into a category, the Snee-Reinhardt Charitable Foundation permits grants for animal welfare, community development, sports, camps, fire and police departments and economic development as miscellaneous grants.  

Partnerships projects are collaborative statewide or regional initiatives that help build local, county, regional and statewide capacity to better develop and manage recreation and park facilities and to promote the conservation of natural and heritage resources through plan implementation, education and training.

Project Types for Partnerships

Convening, Education, or Training

Projects that develop, promote, and/or conduct training or education programs; prepare and distribute technical assistance or educational materials, brochures or videos and/or otherwise provide for the training and education of professionals and/or the general public on a local, county, regional or statewide basis. These projects address issues related to plan implementation, capacity building, training or education programs related to natural resource and community conservation, land and open space preservation, greenways, trails and recreation and parks.

• Example of these types of projects include: Advancing awareness of rivers, greenways, trails, recreation and/or conservation issues through educational conferences, workshops, materials, publications, sojourns and websites.

Special Purpose and Planning Studies

Special Purpose Planning is a comprehensive planning process that will define a long-range (5-10 year) plan of action to organize, implement, manage and market natural resource and community conservation, heritage resources, land and open space preservation, greenways, trails, recreation and parks, or cultural preservation.

Special Purpose Study is a more concentrated study or plan necessary to implement one or more of the recommendations of a previously completed planning study. These projects will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

The Bureau requires that project consultants are selected using a competitive request for proposal (RFP) process.

• Examples of special purpose studies would be management action plans, economic assessments, marketing plans, specialized inventories, preservation and interpretive plans, as well as, special feasibility studies.

Implementation Projects

Implementation Projects are non-planning projects that implement recommendations of previously completed special purpose plans or studies. Examples of implementation projects include the construction of interpretive/educational exhibits, programs, signage and materials, as well as, promotional/marketing products.

The Bureau requires an open and competitive process for the award of all sub-contracts.

Mini-Grants

Statewide and regional partners may request mini-grant funding to develop small grant programs that will implement multiple projects through their local partners. These projects should advance priorities identified through previous completed plans. The request can include a combination of project types eligible for funding under the Statewide and Regional category.

Funding

Requests for DCNR funding in a single application should generally not exceed $300,000 for an 18-month period. The Department may award higher grant amounts at its discretion.

The Lewis A. and Donna M. Patterson Charitable Foundation primarily awards grants to organizations or programs in western Pennsylvania that support the arts, cultural enrichment, higher education, care for the poor, and health care research.

NOTE: Unsolicited requests should be in the form of a letter of inquiry. Solicitations will be accepted throughout the year and grants issued at convenient intervals thereafter. Solicitations received after October 31st will be held for consideration the following year.

Philosophy & Mission

The F. M. Kirby Foundation aims effectively to manage and utilize that which has been entrusted to it over multiple generations of the Kirby family. It strives to make thoughtful and prudent philanthropic commitments to highly selective grantee partners. The goal is to invest in opportunities that foster self-reliance or otherwise create strong, healthy communities.

The Board of Directors recognizes that achieving its philanthropic aspirations takes time, effort and perseverance that often result in sustained funding relationships.

The F.M. Kirby Foundation is a family foundation. Its grantees are largely in geographic areas of particular interest to five generations of family members and, in many cases, are organizations with which family members have been associated.

Scope

The F. M. Kirby Foundation is a family foundation. Its grantees are largely in geographic areas of particular interest to five generations of Kirby family members and, in many cases, are organizations with which family members have been associated. Successful new applicants tend to be organizations already well known to one or more of the directors of the Foundation, and/or other members of the family.

Programmatic Areas of Interest

The F. M. Kirby Foundation donates to organizations within 8 major funding program areas, listed below with brief descriptions:

Arts, Culture, & Humanities

Funding in Arts, Culture, and Humanities includes performing arts centers and programs, cultural community arts development, historical and educational museums, and fine art museums.

Education

The Foundation’s Educational interests include family alma mater support, equitable educational access, school choice, special education and educational support services, civics and history education, and programs fostering entrepreneurship.

Environment & Animals

Areas of interest in Environment and Animals include land conservation and stewardship, environmental law/advocacy organizations, and environmental community development.

Health

Cancer research, neuroscience and neurodegenerative disease research, Type I Diabetes research, and general biomedical research are all included in Foundational research interests. Also included in Health funding is support for medical centers in geographic areas of interest.

Human Services

Support in Human Services includes emergency and disaster services, child protection and domestic violence support, homeless services, food pantries, housing assistance programs, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, mental health services, adoption, health services, cancer support services, youth and family development programs, physical and cognitive disability services, veteran affairs, and community development.

Public Affairs & Society Benefit

Public policy areas of interest include higher education reform, drug and alcohol prevention policy, sexuality and reproductive health and rights, democratic capitalism, free enterprise think tanks, individual rights and free speech policy, immigration reform, and public news media support.

Religion

The F. M. Kirby Foundation provides support for select religious organizations and churches that are of familial special interest.

Mutual Membership Benefit

The F. M. Kirby Foundation belongs to several membership organizations that serve the non-profit and philanthropic sector.