with Hartford Foundation for Public Giving's

The Hartford Foundation has a long history. It was established in 1925 with the primary goal of improving the quality of life for residents in urban and suburban areas in the Greater Hartford region. We provide grants and other support to nonprofits in the region, help donors make effective charitable decisions, and bring people together to solve issues.

My role as a program officer is to hear grant requests as they come in. By being accessible, the foundation is able to respond directly to local community needs. We do broad-based grantmaking and address a full range of issues, from supporting the arts and helping disconnected youth to providing housing and improving literacy.

Throughout our work here at the Hartford Foundation, we always try to go above and beyond financial assistance. Part of our mission is to help agencies figure out what are achievable and measurable outcomes. We also want to support agencies in providing direct services or tapping into existing collaborations to avoid duplication of services. Of course, we also recognize a need for staff training and evaluation of programs to help ensure they are effective and responsive to community needs.

As a prevention effort, we work to support kids in the early stages of their lives. A number of our programs target early childhood development and support local family centers through the Brighter Futures Initiative. For 15 years, we have provided extensive support for after-school programs that complement the work of the Hartford Public Schools in addressing student needs. This year, we began an exciting new partnership with the Hartford Public Schools and other organizations to develop "community schools," which coordinate supports to students in ways that promote academic achievement and respond to family needs. The Foundation also supports 72 summer programs to provide opportunities for participation of inner city youth. More recently, we are looking to expand support of our youth employment programs year-round to help youth continue to develop a sense of responsibility while giving them a little spending money.

In addition, we fund organizations that support older youth, primarily in middle school, as well as youth from 18 to 24. One example is a local reentry program that seeks to improve pre-release and post-release services to young adults as well as older residents released from prison. Another is a planning grant the Foundation awarded to support the development of an alternative school here in Hartford. The goal is to make sure that youth who have not been successful in school or have become involved in the justice system have educational opportunities that respond to their needs.

We have also supported a truancy court prevention project. Local judges work with nonprofit agencies to understand the needs of youth who have been chronically truant and the needs of their families. Together, they develop plans to help kids stay in school and enable their families to support them. The work recognizes the link between chronic truancy and early involvement in the justice system–and the need to support kids in taking a different course.

Over the years, as I have worked with justice-system involved youth, they often talk about wanting to develop their skills, as well as the need to work. Many of them struggle to manage family responsibilities, especially those with children and making their way on their own. They need support in balancing school, work and family–and in finding appropriate outlets to have fun.

We are a regional foundation, so all the nonprofits we support are located in the 29-town Greater Hartford region. We work with nonprofits to take successful program models and adapt them to the special needs of their communities.

We have a large Nonprofit Support Program that helps community-based agencies build their capacity to meet their missions and community needs. This includes help to increase their financial stability, conduct strategic planning, upgrade their technology, and hone their skills to measure outcomes.

As part of our response to the economic climate, we worked in partnership with the Connecticut Council of Philanthropy to hold forums for 1,000 representatives from nonprofit agencies in our region to discuss the federal stimulus package. Our goal was to provide the information nonprofits need to be in a position to access the resources–and to come together to support one another.

This was done fairly early on in the economic crisis, just as the stimulus money was first announced. Today, we continue to follow up with agencies interested in pursing the funding to address community issues.

In addition, the Foundation has increased its transitional operating support grantmaking, which is designed to assist agencies that have experienced a reduction in resources they have come to rely on over the past two to three years. We have set aside $2.5 million dollars for Transitional Operating Support Grants this year. Our goal is to help nonprofits stabilize operations and develop plans for sustaining funding, or phase-out operations.

In these times, it's critical that nonprofits, government agencies, corporations and foundations look to ways they can partner with one another. Nonprofits can work together to explore ways of supporting service coordination, sharing back offices, as well as approaches to avoid duplicating services. Public-private partnerships offer an opportunity to identify shared interests, to consider how existing resources can complement one another, and to discuss how we are approaching our work.

By understanding more fully what each of us is doing and understanding what we can do together, we can maximize our resources and the benefits to the communities we serve.