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About CCFY
The Coalition of Community Foundations for Youth (CCFY) is a network
of over 300 community foundations in communities across the United States
dedicated to securing improved conditions for children, youth and families.
Launched a decade ago with support from the Rockefeller Foundation,
CCFY is now supported by more than a dozen national foundations and
over 125 of our own members through voluntary contributions.
Three themes unify our work: linking, learning
and leveraging. These mutually reinforcing concepts provide us with clarity
of purpose. Using these overlapping strategies, the Coalition acts as a resource
to its members and the community foundation field by:
- Linking community foundations to each other, to national foundations,
and to cutting edge ideas and practices;
- Creating learning environments for community foundations that facilitate
the transfer of innovative ideas between the national and local levels;
and
- Enabling community and national foundations to leverage each other’s
financial and intellectual resources through matching grants and the
processes that surround them.
Over the last decade, the Coalition has:
- Over the last decade, CCFY has awarded over 440 grants totaling more
than $5.3 million to 133 different community foundations, the majority
of which have received multiple grants.;
- provided our members with more than $1 million
in technical assistance (exclusive of that provided by Coalition staff);
- funded and/or worked with numerous practitioners and think tanks,
including the Chapin Hall Center for Children, Urban Institute, Center
for Youth Development and Policy Research, Children's Defense Fund,
IEL Policy Exchange, The Children's Partnership, Family Support America,
the National Association of Child Advocates, and Alternatives, Inc.;
- provided stipends to community foundations to attend Coalition conferences
and trainings, all of which have been offered at no charge to members;
- connected community foundations -- emerging, established, large, small,
urban, and rural -- to national foundation resources and major initiatives;
- sponsored national conferences, institutes, site visits, forums, and
regional meetings featuring some of the country’s leading thinkers
and practitioners on issues affecting children, youth, families, and
the quality of community life;
- provided numerous ways for community foundations to connect to peers
grappling with similar issues and challenges; and
- published and widely disseminated the innovative work community foundations
are engaged in on behalf of children, youth, and families.
Although community foundations are but one piece of a much larger mosaic
that must be assembled to produce lasting change, we believe there are few
institutions as well-positioned to contribute to child, youth, and family
well-being.
As primary funders of the nonprofit sector, community foundations understand
the local landscape, and are part of the local accountability system. Many
initiate as well as participate in collaboratives, and appreciate the synergies
and improved outcomes that result from cooperative efforts to understand
and address local problems.
A significant number have taken steps to broaden and diversify local leadership.
Many have experience in building alliances across the public, private, and
independent sectors. Increasingly, they are venturing into public policy. Finally,
all have strong ties to the traditional business and civic leaders by virtue
of their donor base and boards of directors, groups whose support is essential
to sustaining progress. |
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