Hartford Foundation 2024 Grantmaking Approaches $55 million
Total represents the second largest in organization’s history
The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the community foundation for 29 cities and towns in Greater Hartford, awarded 2,440 grants totaling nearly $55 million to the region’s nonprofit agencies in 2024. The total also includes more than $1.45 million awarded through 440 scholarships. In 2024, Individuals, families, and several organizations opened a total of 19 new funds, and the Foundation received gifts totaling more than $36.6 million. Since its founding in 1925, the Foundation has awarded more than $1.05 billion to organizations across the region. These numbers are unaudited.
“At a time when many in our community continue to face significant fiscal challenges, the Hartford Foundation has been able to provide a meaningful source of support through local nonprofits,” said Hartford Foundation President and CEO Jay Williams. “As we mark our centennial year, we remain committed to serving the diverse needs across our region. Our endowment represents a century of building community trust, and we balance our responsibility to preserve these resources for future generations with the pressing needs of today. We cannot do this work alone and are grateful for the resolute support and vision of our Board of Directors, donors, and other community partners who have joined us in making progress toward our goal of dismantling structural racism and creating equitable social and economic mobility.”
The Foundation organizes its work around five strategic outcomes, including efforts to increase the number of higher opportunity neighborhoods within and outside of Hartford, increase the number of Greater Hartford residents with improved physical and emotional well-being, increase employment opportunities, prioritizing Black and Latine residents in the region, strengthen the culture of civic and resident engagement, and increase equity and inclusion in the arts.
The Foundation’s 2024 grant investments included the following:
Roca Inc. introduced its programming for women from Massachusetts to Greater Hartford in 2021, following an extensive stakeholder engagement process. The Hartford Foundation was one of the initial funders in Hartford awarding $500,000 in 2021 and 2023, and in December 2024 the Foundation continued to support the Young Mothers program with a two-year, $460,000 grant. The funding includes $160,000 from Foundation donors. Roca anticipates expanding its Hartford program, which has already demonstrated significant demand and has a waitlist
Roca’s trauma-informed services help young women develop the skills necessary to support long-term behavior change and improve economic mobility, ultimately disrupting cycles of violence. As they advance through Roca’s multi-year intervention model, participants resume their education and learn skills necessary to obtain and retain employment. In partnership with Bloomfield-based Auerfarm, Roca’s Transitional Employment Program (TEP) works to provide young women a place to practice their skills and navigate barriers to employment while learning how to work and build their resumes.
ReadyCT prepares East Hartford and Hartford public high school students to enter high-growth and high-demand career sectors. The Foundation awarded ReadyCT a $530,000 two-year grant, allowing the organization to build on its efforts to establish business partnerships that better align K-12 education and workforce needs. By connecting with high-demand fields like healthcare, manufacturing, and information technology, ReadyCT helps students build essential skills and earn industry-recognized credentials, promoting economic mobility for individuals and meeting workforce needs of local employers.
In December, the Foundation awarded a three-year, $1.5 million grant to LISC Connecticut to create a more inclusive community development sector in the Greater Hartford region. LISC pools financial resources to provide low-cost capital to nonprofit developers to build and preserve affordable rental units and create homeownership opportunities, offering pre-development financing, bridge loans, lines of credit for community development entities and acting as an intermediary, managing the lending of other partners.
The grant includes operating support for three nonprofit community development corporations, which together serve almost all of Hartford’s neighborhoods including Mutual Housing Association of Greater Hartford, Northside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance (NINA), and Sheldon Oak Central. Through technical assistance and capacity grants, LISC strengthens these organizations to better manage quality affordable housing and carry out comprehensive community development efforts. Through the collaborative, LISC convenes all nonprofit developers in Hartford each quarter to share best practices, hear from key stakeholders, and align advocacy work. LISC also provides technical assistance to suburban communities on affordable housing, including several in the Foundation’s region.
LISC is actively engaging in an evaluation commissioned by the Hartford Foundation to explore its successes and challenges over the past 30 years, as well as to craft and implement a learning and measurement plan to assess future progress on affordable housing goals for Hartford. This evaluation will incorporate a racial equity lens that will explore how funders can better support CDCs led by people of color, as well as develop outcome measurements that will assess equitable affordable housing goals.
In support of tenants’ rights, the Foundation awarded a $150,000 grant to the Connecticut Tenants Union (CTTU), an organization of tenants working toward safe, well maintained, affordable, stable, and democratically controlled housing. CTTU organizes three core campaigns including expanding Just Cause evictions, establishing and updating Fair Rent Commissions, and passing housing code reform in cities across the state. The organization produces research, advocates, and works to build cooperatively run social housing and work with municipalities to shape land use and zoning policy.
The Foundation awarded an 18-month grant to the Hispanic Health Council (HHC) to support the organization’s mission and strategies to provide integrated health care through its Family Wellness Center, community-based services, research, and advocacy. This grant supports HHC’s work to provide integrated, accessible, and culturally responsive behavioral and primary care, community-based participatory research, and advocacy that can contribute to social justice and health equity. The organization’s community outreach and community-based research and advocacy engages community members in the design and implementation of research projects to influence policy changes to address social determinants of health and increase health equity.
In August and November, the Foundation awarded a total of more than $688,000 in Emergency Assistance grants to 71 nonprofit organizations to provide food and other basic needs to residents throughout Greater Hartford. Since 2022, the Foundation has made emergency assistance grants available twice a year, acting on feedback from both regional and local agencies that having access to funds earlier helps in planning and meeting community needs.
These Emergency Assistance grants focus on increasing access to food and addressing immediate needs such as personal care items (e.g., deodorant, diapers), utility assistance, emergency transportation, and items like reading glasses and assistive canes. These grants prioritize nonprofits that serve neighborhoods with a higher percentage of residents living in poverty, seek to reduce barriers to equitable access to basic needs, and provide direct support to individuals. Grants range from $3,000 and $20,000 through support from the Foundation’s discretionary funding and in partnership with the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation.
To support undocumented and immigrant youth and adults in Greater Hartford, the Foundation awarded a $250,000 grant to Connecticut Students for a Dream (C4D) and a $300,000 grant to Make the Road Connecticut.
Connecticut Students for a Dream supports undocumented youth and immigrants through programming focused on supporting immigrant students and children of immigrant parents by providing the resources and guidance they need to successfully navigate the college admissions process and life after high school. This work involves cultivating youth-led leadership, community engagement to connect families to resources, and organizing and advocacy on policies to improve access to education and protections against discrimination. C4D also offers comprehensive support for undocumented youth to better navigate college applications, financial aid and scholarships tailored for undocumented students, as well as alternatives like vocational schools, apprenticeships, and entrepreneurship.
Make the Road CT focuses on pushing for systemic change to provide tangible positive impacts for its members and the wider community. In order to achieve these changes members are organized into committees that focus on specific issues including education equity, housing justice, health equity, worker rights, immigration justice, and resources and support for young people. This work includes making quality interpretation and translation services available in education and healthcare settings, access to health insurance, including Medicaid, supporting stronger tenant protections for renters, and enhanced protections for immigrant workers.
Over the past seven years, the Hartford Foundation has provided more than $1 million in grants for voter education and registration activities across Greater Hartford. In May, the Foundation awarded nearly $240,000 to fourteen nonprofit organizations to support nonpartisan voter engagement activities leading up to the general election in November 2024. This included a grant to The Arc Connecticut in collaboration with CT State Independent Living Council (CSILC) to support extensive civic engagement for persons with disabilities through a series of get out the vote activities statewide.
In 2024, the Hartford Foundation awarded $241K to support the third cohort of the Artists of Color Accelerate Fellowship. This program provides an opportunity for creatives to develop and refine their business acumen, supporting artists to ascend as professionals in an industry that generates billions of revenue in Connecticut each year. Ten artist fellows work at host sites where they hone their skills working with arts organizations, using their talents to have an impact on the community and patrons of the arts. Among the fellows are educators, dancers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, content creators, actors, and multimedia artists.
The Foundation awarded a $150,000 grant to the Wadsworth Atheneum to support its ”Styling Identities: Hair’s Tangled Histories” exhibition that was co-curated with the Amistad Center for Art & Culture and a community advisory board.
The Connecticut News Project received a $200,000 grant to support its “Raising Voices Lab” which is focused on understanding and meeting the information needs of communities of color and tell stories that have historically been and continue to be absent from dominant narratives about underrepresented communities. This effort includes several activities designed to build relationships and understanding information needs in various Hartford neighborhoods through informal and ongoing community listening with a focus on crowdsourcing questions that are most important to community members. This work also involves conducting research and sharing information derived from crowdsourced questions through texts, social media posts, community events, and site-based / newsletter-based explainers under the CT Mirror Explains brand. While these questions primarily originate from the community, additional questions related to voting, engaging in democracy, and learning about candidate positions as well as other topics emerging in communities of color across the country will be highlighted.
In 2024, the Foundation’s Nonprofit Support Program (NSP) Program, which seeks to increase stability, effectiveness and resilience of nonprofits and nonprofit leaders to meet mission and community needs, provided 90 grants, totaling nearly $2 million, to area nonprofits to help them plan for the future, use technology strategically, build financial systems and transition to new leadership. NSP’s learning programs in areas including fund development, financial management, governance, evaluation, human resources and social enterprise helped leaders to manage and govern more effectively and build systems and capacity to help their organizations to thrive.
The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving is the community foundation for Hartford and 28 surrounding towns. Through partnerships, the Foundation seeks to strengthen communities in Greater Hartford by putting philanthropy in action to dismantle structural racism and achieve equity in social and economic mobility. Made possible by the gifts of generous individuals, families and organizations, the Foundation has awarded grants of more than $1 billion since its founding in 1925. For more information, visit www.hfpg.org or call 860-548-1888