Grant Opportunities
Our Donors’ Generosity Leads to Opportunity and Impact
Since 1982, we have had the privilege of stewarding charitable gifts from generous locals who wanted to see our community thrive. Together with our donors, we’ve awarded a total of $251 million to community organizations to date.
Our Mission, Vision, and Values drive our actions
Our Mission
To bring together people, ideas, and resources to inspire philanthropy and accomplish great things.
Our Vision
To make Santa Cruz County thrive for all who call it home, now and in the future.
Our Values
Accelerating Solutions. Building Trust. Advancing Opportunities.
Our Grantmaking Overview
Our Grantmaking is guided by a set of eight principles we apply in awarding funds. Our approach is to provide flexible funding to organizations addressing pressing local issues and creating lasting positive impact. We prefer making grants to support the general operations of nonprofits. We continue to work with leaders of color to make sure that our grant funds are addressing historic and current inequities. You can view our 2023 Community Grant awardees below.
This May we'll award over $1.8 million through our Community Grants cycle. The majority of these funds are restricted to benefiting children and seniors and are focused on education, youth development, end-of-life care, historic preservation, and human services. We have a commitment to making multiple-year unrestricted awards to nonprofits addressing our priority funding areas. Because of that, we’ll only be inviting requests from organizations where we have funds available to fund them, if successful.
If your nonprofit does not receive an invitation and has not applied for a recent Community Grant, but you feel your work lines up well with our top priorities, contact us at grants@cfscc.org.
2024 Community Grants dates:
Feb. 23: Specific nonprofits invited to apply
Mar. 18: Applications due from invited nonprofits
May 3: Funding decisions announced
Year-round: Impact Profiles available for updating, sharing with us and our donors (more below)
Our Priorities
Our Community Grants are made from endowed funds that have been given to the Foundation over four decades. This year, those funds will provide funding to support:
- 37% for Seniors, End-of-Life Care & Historic Preservation
- 33% for Youth & Education
- 8% for Health & Human Services
- 8% for Women & Girls initiatives
- 7% for Environment
- 3% for Arts, Culture & History
- 3% for LGBTQ+ specific causes
- 1% Community Development
When we consider Community Grant proposals, we look at factors including alignment with our funding areas (above), the fit our funding would have in the financial picture, the organization's ability to produce compelling outcomes, and how they advance equity in Santa Cruz County, among other things.
Impact Profile
We work actively to bridge donors’ interests and local nonprofits’ work to address our county’s needs. To stay accessible year-round and help make everyone’s work efficient, we offer a tool to share a profile of your organization’s impact with us and our donors.
Completing an Impact Profile is not a grant request. But its a chance to provide our donors the answers they're most curious to learn. To create one for your organization, first download the Impact Profile Instructional Worksheet.
After reviewing the worksheet, visit our portal to access the Impact Profile form. Don't have a login to our portal? Sign up here. Your responses will be collected in our online form and made available to donors as they consider grants from their donor-advised fund. We accept them on a rolling basis. If you submitted a Community Grant proposal in March, that will serve as your Impact Profile and no further action is needed.
Click the link to view our Impact Profile FAQs.
Learn more about our recent grantmaking: