Convergence Partnership Awards $1.85 Million in Grants

The Convergence Partnership, a collaboration of funders, is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012-2015 Innovation Fund grants. Thirteen foundations were awarded a total of $1.85 million for their innovative solutions to building healthy, equitable communities.

The Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque (CFGD) has been awarded a $50,000 Convergence Innovation Fund grant in partnership with the Northeast Iowa Food & Fitness Initiative.  The three-year grant will fund planning for and creation of a food hub, which will allow local food producers to market, process and distribute healthy food to vulnerable children and their families. The food hub will focus on pilot projects to address barriers to get more local food into schools, stores and institutions.

The awards support new or expanded local and regional projects and initiatives that help ensure all people can live, work, and play in healthy communities. The grants provide as much as $200,000 over three years to each foundation with a required $2 match for every $1 they were awarded.

"Local foundations know their regions best," said Judith Bell, president of PolicyLink and the Convergence Partnership's program director. "By investing in their leadership to effectively support policies and environments that advance health and equity in their most vulnerable populations, the Convergence Partnership can create sustainable, long-term impacts in communities across America."

The first round of the Innovation Fund, which took place from 2010 to 2012, successfully supported local foundations to take risks in their grantmaking, focus on equity, expand their relationship to the communities served, explore policy and environmental change work, enter into new partnerships, and make changes in the way they do their work to better engage with community leaders, particularly in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, and to advance equity. It is expected that similar exciting impacts will take place in the locales where the 2012-2015 awardees work.

Awardees included:
A.H. Zeppa Family Foundation (Duluth, MN)
Blue Grass Community Foundation (Lexington, KY)
Brooklyn Community Foundation (New York, NY)
Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque (Dubuque, IA)
Con Alma Health Foundation (Santa Fe, NM)
The Denver Foundation (Denver, CO)
Endeavor Foundation (Springdale, AR)
Foundation for Louisiana (Baton Rouge, LA)
Headwaters Foundation for Justice (Minneapolis, MN)
Incarnate Word Foundation (St. Louis, MO)
The San Francisco Foundation (San Francisco, CA)
The Seattle Foundation (Seattle, WA)
Sierra Health Foundation (Sacramento, CA)

To find out more about the individual winners, please visit www.ConvergencePartnership.org/InnovationFund.