Apply For A Grant

Printable version

2009 Program Guidelines

The Public Welfare Foundation supports efforts to ensure fundamental rights and opportunities for people in need. We look for carefully defined points where our funds can make a difference in bringing about systemic changes that can improve lives. We focus on three program areas: Criminal and Juvenile Justice, Health Reform and Workers’ Rights.

Criminal and Juvenile Justice

The US criminal justice system is failing. More than two million people are held in American prisons – the largest inmate population in the world. The number is growing daily, largely because of federal and state laws prescribing mandatory minimum sentences, even for non-violent offenders. In addition, despite a steady decline in youth crime since the mid-1990s, juvenile detention populations have risen by more than 20 percent since then. Most significantly, more than 60 percent of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities.  Locking up increasing numbers of people -- disproportionately people of color -- at great expense to taxpayers, and later releasing them with little access to rehabilitation and drug treatment services, has not made our streets safe.

The Foundation’s Criminal and Juvenile Justice Program seeks out grantees with strategies to lower rates of incarceration and decrease prison populations. A grant proposal should incorporate promising strategies that aim to change specific laws, policies or agency regulations. We give special attention to proposals from coalitions of diverse organizations working to accomplish such changes.

The Foundation makes grants to support:

• Reform of sentencing laws, parole and probation systems and development of compassionate release policies.
• Promotion of laws and policies that assist people leaving prison from being re-incarcerated by helping them successfully re-enter society.   
• An end to the practice of trying and incarcerating juveniles as adults.
• Development and expansion of alternatives to youth incarceration.
• Development of innovative strategies to reduce overrepresentation, throughout the criminal and juvenile justice systems, of racial and ethnic minority youth, inmates, probationers and parolees.

Health Reform

A qualitative shift is underway as the United States continues to struggle with the need to change how health care is provided. While Americans have long been aware of the coverage crisis, they are also increasingly aware of the cost crisis, which affects both individual and system-wide health expenses. Health care premiums rose 98 percent, while wages rose only 23 percent from 2000 to 2007. The health care sector now consumes 16 percent of the gross domestic product and shows no signs of abating. Yet, if the ultimate goal is the best health outcomes for the most reasonable cost, Americans get grossly insufficient value for the amount of money spent. Particularly in the southern states, costs are often higher, while health indicators and the performance of the health sector fall below other regions. Across the nation, the health sector too often fails to deliver consistently high quality care in ways that are cost-effective and equitably financed.

Well-informed voices of consumers and skilled advocates can play a major role in developing a health system to which all residents of the United States have access and which gives them high-quality, affordable care. Expanding access, improving quality, and reducing costs are complementary goals that are essential to reform the healthcare system. The Health Reform Program seeks to ensure that the voice of the consumer is heard on these issues, particularly at the state and local levels. The program fosters the development and growth of strong, interdependent and strategically aligned systems of advocacy with expertise in policy, health law, fiscal analysis, issue campaigns, communications, organizing community and interfaith groups, and building coalitions.

We encourage collaboration among advocates within communities, states and regions as well as creative approaches to broadening and deepening the impact of consumer advocacy to create greater value in health care. By awarding larger grants to advocacy organizations in a smaller number of states, the Health Reform Program seeks to foster more thorough and far-reaching advocacy strategies. Since state health reform builds on and refines successful federal policies, such as Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, we support advocacy to improve federal policies, for their own sake and as steps toward quality, affordable health care for all. 

The Foundation makes grants to support:

• State-level consumer advocacy with special emphasis on those states that have access to fewer local and national philanthropic resources.
• Regional efforts by state-based advocates to share strategies and solutions and to conduct multi-state issue campaigns.
• National health policies critical for health reform at the state and national levels.
• Technical assistance by national organizations to state and local consumer advocates to enhance their capacity to work on health policy, issues of quality and cost reduction, fiscal policy, legal action, organizing, organizational development and communications.

Workers’ Rights

Work just isn’t working for too many in America today. The government agencies charged with protecting workers’ health and safety have abandoned scores of regulatory priorities and scaled back enforcement efforts, leaving millions of workers under-protected. Millions of people work without such basic rights as paid sick days. Too many who try to organize in order to negotiate improved working conditions in their workplaces end up fired or find their efforts undermined by anti-organizing campaigns. Those whose rights are violated sometimes discover they lack meaningful remedies, as they either must depend on government agencies that may not respond to their problems or face obstacles to exercising their right to take their cases to court.

The Foundation’s Workers’ Rights Program supports organizations that are trying to improve the lives of working people, especially those most vulnerable to exploitation, by ensuring their basic legal rights to safe, healthy and fair conditions at work.

The Foundation makes grants to support:

• Advocacy, policy analysis, research, litigation, and public education to establish, at the federal and state levels, new labor and employment standards for workers. For projects focusing on state policy, we encourage work in locations with particular strategic value. For projects focusing on enforcement, we seek to fund policy developments, such as laws increasing civil and criminal penalties or empowering workers to act as private attorneys general, rather than enforcement agreements with state or federal agencies, which can be temporary and contingent on labor-friendly administrations. We are particularly interested in:
• Standards for occupational health and safety, including measures to make health and safety regulatory bodies more responsive.
• Policies that restore and improve workers’ rights to bargain collectively, including measures that facilitate worker organizing, increase workers’ options for negotiating workplace or sectoral reform, safeguard democratic accountability in labor organizations, and protect workers against the loss of bargaining power from abuses of guest work programs.
• Guarantees of paid sick days as a fundamental right for workers.
• Measures that ensure employer accountability for workers’ rights by addressing such issues as misclassification, outsourcing and joint employment liability, and workers’ access to justice (including fee shifting for low-income workers’ wage claims, improved class action provisions, and private attorney general laws)
• High-impact campaigns that may not result in federal or state policies but seek labor/employment reforms with a comparably broad-based effect on workers’ rights.  We do not fund purely local campaigns, even those that aspire to be models for broader campaigns.
• Investigative journalism, national broadcast news coverage, and other high-profile media and public education about the workers’ rights issues discussed above. Proposals should specify the size of the typical audience or readership or demonstrate how a sizeable (preferably nationwide) audience or readership could be attained. Preference will be given to programs or publications with sustained and substantial nationwide audiences.

Special Opportunities

The Special Opportunities Program supports initiatives reflecting the Foundation’s underlying values, including its longstanding commitment to racial equity and justice. These often represent extraordinary initiatives that do not fit within the above program areas. At times this program serves as a laboratory for new ideas. It also entertains proposals that combine objectives of more than one Foundation program. Grants made under this program are rare and must be especially compelling.

President’s Discretionary Fund

The President’s Discretionary Fund offers grants of up to $25,000 to advance the Foundation’s priorities. The application process is streamlined, and the grants are typically given for needs that occur between Board meetings. There is a high demand for such grants, and relatively few are given.