Join Habitat and Community Foundation at Montevallo house

Community Foundation staffers love to see our grants in action, whether it is a reading program for kids or a new building for UAB. On Saturday, Oct. 31, several of our staffers will join the great volunteers who have been building a new home for Debra Williams in Montevallo, supported in part by a grant [...]

Keeping Your Home Sweet Home – CBS 42

Explaining how your Community Foundation helps people during these tough economic times can be a challenge. This story by Anna Donaldson on CBS42 shows how a community makes a difference through the Housing Stability Fund.
Yes, the grants come from three great nonprofit organizations — Greater Birmingham Ministries, Hope House and Shelby Emergency Assistance – whose [...]

Tips for giving more: Focus on one charity, join with others

Still looking for ways to increase your impact with limited charitable dollars? Make what can be a hard decision and concentrate all your giving for the year on one organization. Use the tips we have already talked about (research and call the Community Foundation for a recommendation, based on the charities you love).
The wonderful [...]

Grant deadline tomorrow for Community Foundation

We’re looking for great new ideas and new ways to help our nonprofit partners, thanks to the second round of Community Fund grants from the Community Foundation in 2009.
Last spring, we awarded $734,200 to 73 nonprofit organizations from Community Funds, the flexible grantmaking funds dedicated to supporting the most pressing needs and taking [...]

Community health gets boost with $133,000 in grants

The Community Foundation and the Jefferson County Department of Health are powerful partners. Add to the team the other 60 or so organizations that make up the Health Action Partnership, all doing whatever they can to follow “Our Community Roadmap to Health” and make the people of Jefferson County as healthy as they can be.
The [...]

Looking for help with operating costs?

This year, as a change from our usual policy for making grants, the Community Foundation is offering limited support for operations if your nonprofit organization is serving Jefferson, Shelby, St. Clair, Walker or Blount counties. As Senior Program Officer James McCrary said, times are tough and we want to make sure that our important nonprofit [...]

Breaking trails at the Zoo

The official ceremony to start work on the Trails of Africa exhibit at the Birmingham Zoo came on July 29, bringing this savannah in the South closer to reality. That’s great news for the community, because it has the potential to make the state’s top tourist destination even more popular.
The groundbreaking, complete with music, [...]

Do you have a great idea for a grant proposal?

If the nonprofit organization you work for or support has a great idea about how to serve our community’s greatest needs, now is the time to find out how the Community Foundation can help. Senior Program Officer James McCrary and our great Community Investment staff will offer overview sessions about our grant process, starting [...]

Judge Agnes Chappell shows success of Women’s Fund effort

When the Women’s Fund of Greater Birmingham, a component fund of the Community Foundation, began working to create systemic change in how domestic violence cases are handled in our court system, the task was daunting. Today, as a recent op-ed piece by Judge Agnes Chappell describes, it is clear that the efforts of local attorneys [...]

How we make the difficult choices about grants

73 grants to nonprofit organizations and $734,200. That’s what donors past and present made possible just a few weeks ago when we awarded the most recent round of grants from our Community Funds.
84 requests and just under $1.75 million. That’s what we received in requests from nonprofit organizations in Jefferson, Shelby, Blount, Walker and [...]