OUR MISSION
The Joyce Foundation supports efforts to protect the natural environment of the Great Lakes, to reduce poverty and violence in the region, and to ensure that its people have access to good schools, decent jobs, and a diverse and thriving culture. We are especially interested in improving public policies, because public systems such as education and welfare directly affect the lives of so many people, and because public policies help shape private sector decisions about jobs, the environment, and the health of our communities. To ensure that public policies truly reflect public rather than private interests, we support efforts to reform the system of financing election campaigns.
ABOUT THE FOUNDATION
The Joyce Foundation was created in 1948 by Beatrice Joyce Kean of Chicago. The Joyce family wealth, based on lumber and sawmill interests, was left to the Foundation when Mrs. Kean died in 1972. Over the years, the Foundation has continued to respond to changing social needs, contributing over $600 million in grants to groups working to improve the quality of life in the Great Lakes region.
PROGRAMS
Our program areas are Education, Employment, Environment, Gun Violence, Money and Politics, and Culture. We focus our grant making on initiatives that promise to have an impact on the Great Lakes region, specifically the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. A limited number of environment grants are made to organizations in Canada. Education grant making in K-12 focuses on Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee; early childhood grant making focuses on Illinois and Wisconsin. Culture grants are primarily focused on the Chicago metropolitan area, except for the Joyce Awards, which extend to other Midwest cities. We do not generally support capital proposals, endowment campaigns, religious activities, commercial ventures, direct service programs, or scholarships.
The Joyce Foundation is committed to improving public policy through its grant program. Accordingly, the Foundation welcomes grant requests from organizations that engage in public policy advocacy. Federal tax law prohibits private foundations from funding lobbying activities. The Foundation may support organizations engaged in public policy advocacy by either providing general operating support or by funding educational advocacy such as nonpartisan research, technical assistance, or examinations of broad social issues. The Foundation encourages grant applicants to describe the nature of advocacy activities in their grant applications and reports, so the Foundation can ensure that it is in compliance with federal tax laws. For further information on the relevant federal tax laws, grant applicants should consult their tax advisors.
EDUCATION
The Joyce Foundation supports efforts to close the achievement gaps that separate low-income and minority children from their peers by improving the quality of teachers they encounter in school, expanding their access to educational opportunities in early childhood, and exploring such innovations as small schools and charter schools.
Program priorities are:
Teacher quality: The Foundation supports efforts to improve federal, state, and district policies so that high-need schools in Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee can attract and retain first-rate teachers. Efforts include research, policy development, model programs, advocacy, and evaluation related to:
- Reform of recruiting and hiring systems
- Reform of teacher evaluation and compensation systems
- New teacher support
- Alternative routes to teaching
- Principal quality
Early childhood education: The Foundation supports policy initiatives aimed at making preschool accessible to all three- to five-year-olds in Illinois and Wisconsin through a mixed delivery system that includes schools and community-based settings. Efforts include research, public education, demonstration projects, and advocacy designed to:
- Identify effective strategies for implementing high-quality pre-kindergarten in schools and community-based settings
- Build public and policy-maker support for implementing such programs
Innovation grants: A small portion of program funds is reserved for other outstanding opportunities to close the achievement gap, especially policy-oriented efforts to expand the supply of high-quality charter schools and small schools in Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee.
EMPLOYMENT
Major labor shortages are predicted by the end of this decade as baby boomers retire. Contributing to the shortages is the serious skills deficit that plagues the existing workforce, especially low-wage workers. The Employment Program supports policy analysis and development, research, and advocacy that helps low-wage, low-skilled individuals connect to the labor market, stay employed and advance to higher-paying jobs.
Program priorities are:
Evaluating employment strategies for formerly incarcerated individuals
The Joyce Foundation is funding a research demonstration project to test whether transitional jobs programs are an effective employment strategy for formerly incarcerated individuals.
Promoting employment stability
- Advocacy projects that work to defend, maintain, and, when possible, expand work-related benefit policies, including Medicaid, Child Health Insurance, food stamps, earned income tax credit, and child care subsidies
- Research efforts that add to existing knowledge about the relationship between work-related benefit policies and job retention and advancement
- Policy development to improve state and federal service delivery to better match the needs of low-wage workers
Shifting Gears: An Employment Policy Initiative
The Joyce Foundation is leading an effort to strengthen policies to enable low-wage and low-skilled workers to advance in education and training systems, to acquire postsecondary credentials, and to move up in the labor market. Funding supports:
- Convening and staffing cross-agency state working groups empowered to improve state policies on adult education, workforce development, post-secondary education, welfare, and economic development;
- Advocacy and strategic communications to promote public investment in this work; and
- Development and evaluation of regional demonstrations in order to inform state policy.
The Foundation does not provide operating support for direct services, such as job training or transitional jobs programs.
ENVIRONMENT
Restoring and protecting the natural environment of the Great Lakes region has been a long-time commitment of the Joyce Foundation. The Foundation supports the development, testing, and implementation of policy-based, prevention-oriented, scientifically sound solutions to the environmental challenges facing the region.
Program priorities are:
Energy from clean coal.* Because fossil fuel emissions create pollution and foster climate changes that threaten the Great Lakes, the Foundation has a long-standing interest in the energy infrastructure of the region. Investment and policy or regulatory decisions about proposed new coal-burning power plants will shape not only our electricity system for the future, but the future of the Lakes as well. We are committed to promoting policies that encourage (through incentives and regulatory structures) the development of clean coal technologies and to ensuring that state agencies approve only those projects that meet state-of-the-art standards for minimizing air pollution and have significant promise for reducing or capturing carbon emissions. The Foundation supports efforts to engage state officials and power plant developers to build the cleanest possible plants to meet the region's electricity needs.
Healthy rivers, healthy lakes.* The health of the Great Lakes depends in part on the health of the rivers that feed them. Those tributaries are threatened by nutrient and sediment runoff, altered water flows, loss of habitat, and contaminated sediments. The Foundation supports efforts to coordinate conservation and restoration in a handful of selected Great Lakes tributary watersheds and to document the benefits of those efforts.
Great Lakes restoration. Protecting the Great Lakes, with their vast economic and environmental significance, should be a national priority. The Foundation supports collaborative efforts to build a policy case for significant public investment in, and to shape implementation of, Great Lakes restoration.
Special opportunities. The Foundation will consider especially promising proposals for addressing other threats to the Great Lakes, including invasive species.
*Proposals on clean coal and healthy rivers will be considered by invitation only. River projects currently under consideration are limited to river systems in the western Lake Erie basin.
GUN VIOLENCE
Gun violence takes approximately 30,000 American lives each year, second only to automobile crashes among causes of injury-related death. But while safety regulations have dramatically reduced highway fatalities, firearms remain virtually unregulated. The Gun Violence Program supports efforts to bring the firearms industry under comprehensive consumer product health and safety oversight as the most promising long-term strategy for reducing deaths and injuries from handguns and other firearms.
Program priorities are:
- Supporting state-based policy initiatives in Illinois and Wisconsin that can achieve meaningful reforms and provide a model for gun policy nationwide
- Supporting state groups in other Midwest states to expand their membership, funding levels, and organizational capacity to promote meaningful gun policy
- Supporting focused research to inform state policy efforts
MONEY AND POLITICS
The overriding goal of the Money and Politics Program is to preserve and strengthen those values and qualities that are the foundation of a healthy democratic political system: honesty, fairness, transparency, accountability, competition, and informed citizen participation. Accordingly, the Foundation seeks to create political cultures in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin which make it possible for more citizens, not just those who are wealthy and well-connected, to run for public office; offers voters real candidate and policy choices at election time; protects voting rights; preserves respects the independence and impartiality of the courts; promotes the public's right to know about government operations and decisions; guarantees the fairness and reliability of elections; and provides citizens with the information needed to make reasoned decisions.
To promote these ends, the Foundation supports organizations and coalitions in the Midwest that are willing and have the skills to:
- Contribute to the development and promotion of broad, multi-issue political reform agendas within the target states, including improvements in the laws and practices governing campaign finance, elections, government ethics, redistricting, lobbying, judicial selection, government openness, and local news coverage of government and politics
- Engage in activities necessary for effective advocacy--policy research and development, public and policy-maker education, coalition-building, news media outreach, and participation in official proceedings, including litigation
- Work collaboratively with other reform groups, academic and legal experts, and policy makers to advance shared goals within their states and across the region
- Participate in activities designed to enhance their capacities in the areas of strategic planning, organizing, coalition-building, fund-raising, advocacy, and communications
CULTURE
The Culture Program supports the efforts of cultural institutions, primarily in Chicago, to serve and represent the city's diverse populations. The Program is interested in projects that bring diverse audiences together to share common cultural experiences and encourage more of Chicago's people to see the arts as integral to their lives.
Program priorities are:
Access: Encouraging mid-sized and major cultural institutions to increase the participation of people of color in their audiences, boards, and staff
Community-based arts: Increasing the availability of high-quality cultural programs in specific low-income, diverse communities, and strengthening the infrastructure and leadership of culturally specific and community-based arts organizations
Creativity: Supporting the artistic development and the commissioning of new works by artists of color. This goal is addressed in part through the Joyce Awards, an annual competition open to major and mid-size cultural organizations in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The Joyce Awards support the commissioning and production of new works in dance, music, theater, and visual arts by artists of color. The hope is that these partnerships will produce important new works of art, strengthen our cultural institutions, and draw people of all backgrounds to experience the deep rewards of participating in the arts. Proposed projects should include substantive community engagement efforts. Collaborations between organizations across the target cities and joint programming are encouraged.
SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES
The Foundation makes some grants to projects outside its primary program areas. Preference is given to projects that encourage debate on timely public policy issues, reflect concern for social equity or regional cooperation, or explore connections among the Foundation's programs.
PRESIDENT'S DISCRETIONARY FUND
The President's Discretionary Fund is used to make small, expeditious grants that advance the Foundation's priorities, and to support other activities of interest to the Foundation. Competition for discretionary funds is very high.
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