NCCF Awards More Than $1.25 Million in Grants

The New Canaan Community Foundation on Monday announced that it’s awarding more than $1.25 million in grants this year—a total that the nonprofit organization believes is a record high.

Each year, the NCCF convenes “grant review teams” composed of community members and leaders to assess requests for funding among local and area nonprofits.

On Monday, the NCCF held its Grant Awards Coffee at New Canaan Library. There, the organization shared that it is awarding grants ranging from $2,500 to $25,000 to nonprofits that cover a wide range of human services and other needs, including ABC New Canaan, The Glass House, New Canaan CARES and Waveny Park Conservancy.

The NCCF is “grateful to all of the donors that supported our work this year,” NCCF President and CEO Lauren Patterson told NewCanaanite.com during the coffee.

“We’re providing really important support to help maintain busy running organizations,” she said. ”In other cases, we’re helping programs expand to meet new client demands or an important capital project to build or invest in something that will help the organization grow over time.”

To determine the amount of money awarded to each organization, the NCCF has annual grant reviewers who visit the nonprofits and make a recommendation to the Community Foundation’s board.

 “We believe in being a community led by process,” Patterson said. “It’s incredibly valuable for volunteers and folks with all different varieties of experience and viewpoints in our community for them to evaluate the organization, to say if they believe that’s where their community’s collective dollars would be best spent.”

This year, there were more than 100 grant reviewer volunteers, Patterson said. 

“We have many new people and some returning, and that’s really what powers this whole effort,” she said. “We really couldn’t do it without the volunteer corps.”

Overall, the big message from this year’s grant process is that there is “a growing demand in the community for a number of issues,” Patterson said. 

“We were really grateful that we had generous donor support this year so we could put extra resources towards all varieties of human service needs, which includes things like access to food, healthcare, housing and any support for families that need extra assistance,” she said.

The NCCF was able to also put extra money toward continued behavioral health work and early childhood work, Patterson said.

“I think this year we were able to increase our impact by making larger dollar investments both in smaller areas and larger dollar grants,” she said.