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Our Grants Programs

Our grants are awarded annually for general operational support as well as for specific projects.

Operational Support

These grants support daily operating costs and specific projects. Applications are reviewed two times a year; the deadlines are March 1 and August 1. Grant announcements occur approximately four months after the deadline.

Helpful Guidelines Below
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The Guidelines

Priority is given to applicants that:

Address two or more of our funding priorities at the same time:
  • Strengthen our food system
  • Enhance equitable community health outcomes
  • Safeguard our environment and natural resources
Demonstrate strong community ties.

Operate within viable and clearly defined plans for positive change.

Areas not funded
  • Capital construction
  • Deficit funding
  • Endowments
  • For national organizations with local chapters, we may choose to fund either the national chapter or a local chapter.
  • Individuals
  • Local and/or state government agencies
  • Media projects (such as films, books, radio) – including distribution costs for these programs
  • Religious groups
  • Sponsorship of seminar, media, or fundraising events (e.g. Fun Runs)

By Invitation Only

Our By Invitation grants help nonprofit organizations make investments that result in a qualitative leap in their operations, their reach and their impacts by entering new issue areas, moving from the local and regional levels to the national level, and/or dramatically deepening and broadening their services. These grants provide stability over multiple years and are typically more than $50,000 a year. Nonprofits may not self-nominate or solicit our interest in consideration of these grants. The Foundation initiates all invitations.

Overview

Expansion Grants are awarded by invitation only and support:
  • New geographic reach (e.g., from local to statewide or statewide to regional)
  • Major engagement in new issue areas
  • Deepening of existing or delivery of new services that enhance scope of impact
Expansion Grants are designed to encourage innovation, more risk-taking, and blazing of new territory that:
  • Strengthens the food system
  • Enhance equitable community health outcomes
  • Safeguards the environment

Grantee Highlight

Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN)

Empowering the Next Generation of Change-makers

PLAN educates students about the waste crisis, and equips them with skills and resources to implement solutions in their campus communities. The foundation’s $240,000 grant supports the New Hampshire-based group’s nationwide expansion of its campus-based zero-waste network, and zero-waste consulting services.

In 2011, students at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) launched the group’s pilot program, Trash 2 Treasure (T2T). They collected furniture and other essentials that UNH students discarded when they moved out in the spring, stored those items for the summer, and re-sold them at affordable prices during a giant yard-sale over move-in weekend the following fall. T2T became the first student-led, self-sustaining program of its kind in the country.

Among the UNH students was Alex Freid who, two years later, founded PLAN—to provide materials, analysis and training to support student leaders and university administrators interested in launching similar programs on other campuses, and to sustain student-led, zero waste projects.
 
With the help of Clif Family Foundation’s three-year Expansion Grant, PLAN projects that it will double its number of campus networks, increase full-time staff by 60%, and grow earned income by over 50%.

Visit PLAN
By Invitation Only grants are also offered in Canada MODULE_2