We serve a unique role in our community.
We lead our region by:
- Inviting stakeholders together and facilitating discussions where they have space to share their experiences, concerns, and ideas for Greater Hartford.
- Commissioning, sharing, and improving the availability of high-quality data in our region to inform strategies and funding priorities.
- Partnering with policymakers to shape legislation and transform systems informed by the learning from our grantmaking and supporting advocacy efforts led by nonprofits, community groups, and residents.
- Seeking out strategic partnerships with mission-aligned organizations to pilot initiatives that offer innovative, tailored solutions that address disparities.
What We Support
Here are some examples of our Community Leadership work:
The Equality Fund
Through the Equality Fund, Greater Hartford Gives awards grants and supports programs to benefit Greater Hartford’s LGBTQIA+ community.
$2.5 million in grants to empower Greater Hartford’s Black and Latine communities
Grants to the Hispanic Federation and the Prosperity Foundation represent a major investment toward our priorities of dismantling structural racism and advancing equity.
Our Community Leadership Grantmaking
We seek to strengthen Greater Hartford through investments and partnerships that expand community power, foster innovation, share knowledge, and drive systemic and cross-sector change. Our community leadership grantmaking strives to be:
- Transformational: ceding or expanding decision-making power and/or resources to residents, groups, or organizations most proximate to and impacted by the efforts at hand.
- Exploratory: providing financial support and momentum for emergent but informed and promising strategies that may be unfamiliar to the Foundation or region.
- Field-building: strengthening partnership or coalition-based approaches in an exploratory area or cross-cutting among the Foundation’s strategic outcome areas.
- Knowledge-building: evolving or advancing information and best practices in philanthropy in an exploratory area or cross-cutting among the Foundation’s strategic outcome areas.
- Responsive to a time-bound, unanticipated, or growing critical need in the region which may also tie into statewide or national current events.
The Foundation as Advocacy Leader
We work closely with state and local policymakers to share insights and expertise from our grantmaking and partnerships that shape policies and the allocation of resources in ways that have a positive and lasting impacts on residents throughout Greater Hartford.
