I received an interesting response to this week's e-letter from Donna Douglas at the Erie Community Foundation. It seems the foundation is dedicating some of its resources to addressing some of the problems I brought up in the newsletter.

Here's what Donna had to say:

The Erie Community Foundation is launching a new strategic grant making program in 2007 that touches on a number of the issues you refer to in this week's Inside Erie. We are calling it Shaping Tomorrow.

Specifically, go to our web site at:

www.eriecommunityfoundation.org

Take a look at that section of the 2007 Grant Guidelines under the Grant seekers drop down menu. You will see that we are launching a $500,000 per year effort over the next five years to fund new & innovative programs that:

Create Solutions for Working Families including:
Poverty reduction,
Employment & career advancement,
Education and training opportunities and
Improving access to quality health care;

And that create Solutions for Civic Change
including promoting regional collaborations and the creation of a realistic, action-oriented civic agenda.

And lastly creating Solutions for Nonprofits by supporting the Nonprofit Partnership and turning over the management and funding of capacity building grants for nonprofits to the Partnership, also.

Details are given on our web site and it would be great if you could pass the word along. Any nonprofit agencies willing to help The Foundation tackle these problems-- specifically with low income and underserved populations -- need to contact us to be placed on our mailing list when the Requests for Proposals for these initiatives are disseminated.

We are very excited about this new approach to community improvement and hope the rest of the community will be also. We will continue to offer our traditional quarterly grant making as well, but now with an eye towards substantive systemic change though strategic grant making, also.

This is great news for the Erie community.

More is still needed. But it will help focus some resources in an area that definitely needs help.