The North Penn Community Health Foundation is a private foundation providing support to organizations that serve the unmet health and/or human service needs of residents and organizations living in and serving the community.
The foundation will strategically focus on providing grant support to our strategic partner organizations and others striving to offer high quality, high impact and cost-effective services to targeted populations.
The foundation’s areas of Funding Priority are:
The foundation’s grant program is primarily intended to benefit low- and moderate- income people. While others may benefit from similar programs, only these groups will receive priority consideration for funding support.
Organizations seeking grant support from the foundation must demonstrate how specific problems and unmet needs manifest themselves in the Greater North Penn community and link this understanding to specific efforts the applicant intends to pursue. The applicant must specify what results (outcomes) are anticipated. Additionally, applicants are strongly urged and will soon be required to link their requests for grant funding to their agency’s strategic and business plans. Successful applicants will demonstrate a strong connection between the foundation’s areas of funding priority and their organization’s strategic/business plans so that the grant request is aligned with both.
The foundation has established “guiding principles” to assess whether evidence about the applicant’s commitment to these principles can be demonstrated through past practice or incorporated into the framework of the proposed grant workplan. The foundation highly values demonstrated efforts to explore partnerships and to leverage core competencies and resources among community partners that might not otherwise be available, as robust or as sustainable as an individual grantee’s effort.
Applicants seeking capacity building grants (under the priority area of Strengthening Organizational Effectiveness and Partnerships) MUST include an organizational self-assessment completed within the past twelve months (use of the Core Capacity Assessment Tool (CCAT) or other preapproved tool is required). Funding preference will be given to capacity building requests that are designed to help an organization build/sustain effective leadership/management and/or to an organization committed to developing/delivering high quality, high impact program/services that are fiscally sustainable, responsive to community needs and not duplicative of existing programs/services.
STRATEGIC INITIATIVES
The foundation is particularly interested in promoting innovative and sustainable initiatives responsive to unmet needs that will also improve the overall quality and availability of health and human services in our community. To address selected unmet community needs, the foundation occasionally invites nonprofit organizations to work on a foundation-initiated project. There are currently eight strategic initiatives. Each initiative has a strategic partner (grantee). Through a collaborative exchange of ideas the foundation negotiates with its strategic partner organizations the priorities for achieving accomplishments and results, workplans and budgets. The foundation provides negotiated operating support to these strategic partners.
