As Greater Boston's community foundation, the Boston Foundation devotes its resources to building and sustaining a vital, prosperous city and region, where justice and opportunity are extended to everyone.
The Boston Foundation Program Department is committed to making a profound and measurable impact in the Greater Boston community as exhibited in their grant making through the department's five Impact Areas, the Open Door Grants program, and other programs of their Social Justice Ecology framework.
Focus Areas:
- Arts and Culture: Enhancing civic and cultural vitality in Greater Boston. The Arts and Culture impact area works in concert with the City of Boston's cultural plan, Boston Creates, to drive investment, innovation, collaboration and inclusiveness across all levels of Greater Boston's arts ecosystem.
- Education: Strengthening the education-to-career pipeline and pathways from early childhood through postsecondary completion. We work to ensure that all Greater Boston residents can access the education and training they will need to remain in our region and succeed in their careers.
- Health and Wellness: Focusing on prevention and long-term health. The Health + Wellness impact area strives to lower rates of overweight and obesity in Boston and Massachusetts, and to reduce health-care costs through a focus on prevention.
- Neighborhoods and Housing: The Neighborhoods strategy supports communities adjacent to Boston's Fairmount Indigo Commuter Rail Line to build their collective capacity to advocate for equitable development policies and become a political force recognized by state and local policymakers. We achieve this primarily through advancing the development of the Fairmount Indigo Network.
- Jobs and Economic Development: Our workforce development efforts focus on increasing the number of people receiving training for low-, middle- and high-skilled jobs and careers in sectors like hospitality, culinary arts and IT. One of our key partners in helping to build job skills for Greater Boston residents is SkillWorks.
Open Door Grants
To complement their program area-targeted approach — the five Impact Areas — the Boston Foundation distributes a portion of its resources via the Open Door Grants program, which responds to the expressed opportunities and challenges in the communities they serve.
Open Door Grants is an open, responsive semi-annual grantmaking program, especially focused on organizations serving and building power in communities historically excluded from institutional philanthropy and whose leadership reflects the demographic composition and lived experiences of communities they serve.
Social Justice Ecology
In addition to Open Door Grants, the Social Justice Ecology framework guides TBF's work to support the conditions for social justice to thrive in Greater Boston by providing access to resources and support for people, movements and nonprofit organizations working to disrupt persistent structural and institutional inequity. It includes their grantmaking and other programs to create space and provide resources for social justice leaders, support resident-led movements to amass and sustain power, and build equity and effectiveness in Greater Boston's nonprofit sector.
2021 grantees can be seen at https://www.tbf.org/-/media/tbf/files/nonprofits/grants-lists/boston-foundation-grants-fy21-full-list-for-web.pdf?la=en&hash=E4F9E0DBF9DB180DD79033A34E812FE8A52F442D
The Boston Foundation does not make grants for capital construction costs, endowments, medical or academic research, scholarships, sectarian or religious purposes, or to support candidates for political office. Private non-operating foundations, 501(c)(4) organizations, and Section 501(a)(3) Type III Non-functionally Integrated organizations are not eligible to apply. In addition, grants are not made to individual persons or individual schools. Schools must apply through their school districts and districts may submit one application every 12 months.