Grants for Computers for Nonprofits

About Us

Established CLF in 1999, The Charles Lafitte Foundation (CLF) supports innovative and effective ways of helping people help themselves and others around them to achieve healthy, satisfying and enriched lives.

Diverse in scope, The Charles Lafitte Foundation (CLF) supports four primary causes: education, children’s advocacy, medical research & initiatives, and the arts. The foundation is flexible in its approach, sometimes giving a one-time grant to initiate a specific project while also making annual contributions.

It looks for a solid track record of setting and meeting objectives, and an inventive approach to problem solving. Understanding the tremendous personal satisfaction derived from volunteering and giving back, CLF hosts annual events such as its golf tournament, with all donations plus a match by the foundation benefiting a single charity.

Programs

Education

Education empowers individuals to find solutions, improving not only their own life but the lives around them.

Learning, a lifelong quest, is the foundation of all knowledge and skills. Through education, we can tackle larger social issues and foster responsible citizenship. CLF helps individuals gain access to schools, from preschool through college, by issuing grants and taking an active role in exploring new approaches to education.

Ways to improve teaching results include providing computer-based and technological education, promoting leadership skills, and offering programs about the arts. In addition, opportunities for ongoing education, such as research projects and conferences, promote continuing education as a goal for people of all ages.

Within the CLF education initiatives, we support programs that:

• Aid students with learning disabilities
• Target at-risk populations and integrate all learners
• Provide equal access
• Offer quality programming using innovative methods
• Apply data-driven approaches
• Educate the whole child

Children's Advocacy

Children’s advocacy nurtures and protects the most innocent.

Bettering the lives of children is central to CLF’s purpose. Ultimately, the goal is to help children reach their fullest potential, which means sufficient education, healthcare, shelter and care.

The foundation sponsors programs that mitigate the hardship that confronts and impedes too many children. This means targeting issues like child abuse, adequate foster housing, literacy and hunger.

Improving children’s education is essential to achieving positive outcomes for children and youth of all ages. It also creates communities where children and families can thrive. After-school programs enhance and strengthen the educational experience, helping to keep children in school, gain self-esteem and thrive.

We also encourage children to be their own advocates. Check out the Charles Lafitte Foundation Kid’s Corner.

Medical Research & Initiatives

Medical research and initiatives spawn breakthroughs in our understanding of wellness and allow us to proactively counter disease and suffering.

CLF supports and encourages health research and education, leading to better healthcare, disease prevention, and healthier lives. Through education, public awareness of basic wellness issues can be illuminated and healthy lifestyles and habits encouraged. The foundation looks for efforts that stress quality of life, including disease prevention, and often focuses on specific groups with serious and neglected problems.

Through research, medical advancements are explored and tested, resulting in the therapies and treatments of tomorrow. Other medical initiatives, such as long-term patient housing and palliative care, require serious attention and solutions.

The Arts

The arts enrich minds and stimulate the human spirit.

Exposure to the arts is vital to fostering and sustaining healthy communities. With diminished civic support and declining patronage, most arts organizations are increasingly challenged. Innovation, creativity, initiative, and risk taking are intrinsic to artistic expression, inspiring audiences to dig deeper into their personal potential and freeing minds to contemplate dreams.

CLF goals for arts funding include:

• cultivating new talent
• supporting established artists
• providing educational programs that encourage children’s creativity
• furthering equal access to the arts
• establishing therapeutic arts programs

Grants

Giving is personal for the Charles Lafitte Foundation, as we reflect the values and imperatives of our founders, Jeffrey Citron and Suzanne Citron.

Every member of the foundation is involved in all of our work, including researching organizations, reviewing grant requests, determining programs, and evaluating outcomes. Every grant is carefully considered. We believe that with each grant CLF awards, we are taking one step closer to a better world.

Giving Preferences

• prefers underwriting specific projects with distinct goals, and targets grants that will have a notable impact and make a material difference
• looks for creativity, innovation and initiative
• promotes inclusiveness and diversity, and likes projects that remove barriers to full economic and/or social participation in society
• engages with its beneficiaries and requires follow-up reports and impact statements
• reviews financials carefully and prefers organizational overhead costs to account for less than 15% of annual expenses
• looks to empower organizations to achieve long term stability
• does not usually support political organizations or religious-based programs
• believes in a commonsense, business-like approach to addressing humane problems.

NOTE: Submission deadlines vary by program. RCN proposals should be submitted to a particular program according to the program's submission dates; PIs should consult program websites and contact cognizant program officers for guidance.

The goal of the RCN program is to advance a field or create new directions in research or education by supporting groups of investigators to communicate and coordinate their research, training and educational activities across disciplinary, organizational, geographic and international boundaries. The RCN program provides opportunities to foster new collaborations, including international partnerships, and address interdisciplinary topics. Innovative ideas for implementing novel networking strategies, collaborative technologies, training, broadening participation, and development of community standards for data and meta-data are especially encouraged. RCN awards are not meant to support existing networks; nor are they meant to support the activities of established collaborations. RCN awards also do not support primary research. Rather, the RCN program supports the means by which investigators can share information and ideas, coordinate ongoing or planned research activities, foster synthesis and new collaborations, develop community standards, and in other ways advance science and education through communication and sharing of ideas.

Proposed networking activities directed to the RCN program should focus on a theme to give coherence to the collaboration, such as a broad research question or particular technologies or approaches. Participating programs in the Directorates for Biological Sciences (BIO), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Geosciences (GEO), Education and Human Resources (EHR), Engineering (ENG) and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) will accept RCN proposals. PIs are encouraged (for CISE required) to discuss suitability of an RCN topic with a program officer that manages the appropriate program. Several other NSF solicitations accept RCN proposals, or support research networking activities if appropriate to the solicitation.

The Bellwether Foundation is a charitable foundation located in St. Louis, Missouri. The mission of The Bellwether Foundation is to promote the ideals and aspirations of its founders and supporters beyond their lifetime by providing funds to organizations for projects which anticipate the future in the areas of the arts, computer science, education, finance, health care, medicine, and the social sciences, including research in any of these areas. Bellwether will receive, manage, and disburse funds on an annual or more frequent basis to provide for opportunities in any geographic region deemed appropriate by the Board of Trustees.

Areas of current funding interest include:

• Education 
• Conservation
• St. Louis Civic Institutions

Note: deadlines above are for General Support, Accessibility, and Multiyear applications.

Resist Grantmaking

Resist believes in grassroots organizing, creativity, and power. 

That is why we strive to be a very different type of foundation. We are a grassroots foundation, with grassroots donors, that supports grassroots action.

Funding Priorities

Resist is a foundation that supports people's movements for justice and liberation. We redistribute resources back to frontline communities at the forefront of change while amplifying their stories of building a better world.  

Therefore Resist funds groups that:

Resist.

Groups that organize, base build, engage in direct action and cultural organizing. Groups organize within communities for structural social and economic change. Groups develop tools for consciousness raising, including popular education and radical pedagogy development.

Re-imagine.

Groups that actively build new systems that provide alternatives to the ones we're fighting now. These groups live into transformative justice by creating community-based alternatives to dehumanizing or inaccessible institutions and systems. This work might look like: alternatives to policing, urban gardens, cooperative childcare, etc.

Build Resilience.

Groups that are creating through arts and cultural work and all forms of creative resilience building. Groups that are healing through sacred resistance, sustainability, ritual, bodywork, and other embodied healing for communities engaged in the work of liberation.

Groups that are aligned with Resist will fit most of the following:

• Their work is located within an ecology of social justice organizations. They are aware of how their work fits into a greater whole. Work reflects a clear understanding of purpose and function within movements for social change
• have an intersectional / cross-issue analysis
• work actively against white and Christian supremacy, capitalism, gender and sexual oppression and all forms of patriarchy
• are led by those most affected by structural oppression

General Support Grants

General Support Grants are available for up to $4,000 to support groups who are building movements for justice and liberation and resisting systemic oppression through grassroots/cultural organizing, art-making and resilience building. General support grants are awarded by a panel of previously funded Resist grantees. Groups are funded based on the strength of their overall application. Awards can be used to best meet your group’s needs. Groups can only be funded once per 12-month period. There is no limit to the number of times a grantee can receive funds. If a group has been fully funded twice in the past five years, they may apply for a multi-year grant.

Multi-year Grants

Open only to current grantees who meet the above requirements and have been fully funded twice in the past five years. Multi-year funding consists of three years of full funding ($4000), starting with the year the multi-year application is submitted. If you are eligible and would like to apply for a Multi-Year Grant, send us an email so we can provide the access code that you will input into our online application system.

Accessibility Grants

Resist is committed to supporting projects that enable all people to participate in the movement for justice and liberation. Resist will fund the additional costs of making projects or events more accessible to community members with specific accessibility needs. Accessibility grants are awarded up to $4,000.

Rapid Response Grants

Resist offers $1,000 Rapid Response grants to better meet the needs of frontline groups and organizations. This grant is decided on by Resist staff and generally has a one week turn around.

Resist offers Rapid Response Grants for groups and organizations to:

• Imagine and Build: for groups seeking financial support with training, consultation, healing, cultural work, conflict resolution, and/or restructuring. Examples include (but are not limited to): developing organizing skills, exploration of new strategies,community-led arts and culture work, board and staff development, fundraising support, and training, computer, and software training, transformative and strategic planning.
• Resist and Respond: for groups seeking to respond to unforeseen and timely political opportunities with organizing and/or cultural interventions. Examples include (but are not limited to) organizing direct action, creative resistance, and travel to protests in response to a call to action.

Emergency and Technical Assistance Grants

Open and ongoing (decision and notification within one week of receiving the application) 

Note: This BAA is a continuously open announcement valid throughout the period from the date of issuance through 31 March 2022, unless announced otherwise.

The purpose of this Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) is to solicit research proposals in the engineering, physical, life, and information sciences for submission to the Army Research Office (ARO) for consideration for possible funding. 

Proposals are sought from institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations, state and local governments, foreign organizations, foreign public entities, and for-profit organizations (i.e. large and small businesses) for scientific research in mechanical sciences, mathematical sciences, electronics, computing science, physics, chemistry, life sciences, materials science, network science, and environmental sciences. Proposals will be evaluated only for fundamental scientific study and experimentation directed toward advancing the scientific state of the art or increasing basic knowledge and understanding. Proposals focused on specific devices or components are beyond the scope of this BAA. Proposals are expected to be for cutting-edge innovative research that could produce discoveries that would have a significant impact on enabling new and improved Army operational capabilities and related technologies. The specific research areas and topics of interest described in this  document should be viewed as suggestive, rather than limiting. ARO is always interested in considering new innovative research concepts of relevance to the Army. Additional information about ARO areas of interest can be found on the ARL website. 

Project Description

The Rosenberg Fund for Children provides for the educational and emotional needs of children of targeted progressive activists and youth who are targeted activists themselves. In most instances grants are paid to professionals and institutions to provide services to beneficiaries. 

Definitions/Limitations

The RFC defines “targeted” as someone who as a result of his or her activism, has:

• lost a job
• suffered physical or mental injury or disability
• been harassed or discriminated against
• been imprisoned
• or died

The RFC defines “progressive activities” as those taken to further any of the following beliefs:

• All people have equal worth
• World peace is a necessity
• People are more important than profits
• Society must function within ecologically sustainable limits

What the Rosenberg Fund for Children Funds

The RFC funds institutions and individual providers who support the values listed above. Subject to our financial ability, the RFC will fund such things as: counseling; school tuition; camp tuition; cultural lessons; after-school programs; prison visits; and post high-school books and supplies for college or other educational training.

Granting Programs

The RFC provides four types of grants:

RFC Regular Granting Program

This program provides up to $3,000 per child per year but no more than $2,000 awarded for the benefit of a child or youth and UP TO $7500 per family in one granting cycle. For example, someone who receives a grant of $2,000 in the spring is only eligible to apply for $1,000 in the fall; someone who receives $1,500 in the spring can apply for $1,500 in the fall. Subject to financial ability, the RFC will fund such things as:

• school tuition;
• camp tuition;
• counseling;
• cultural lessons;
• recreational programs; and
• after-school programs.

NOTE: there is a maximum of two providers per child per granting cycle and a completed computer request form (available on the applications page) MUST be submitted with all computer requests. 

Carry It Forward Awards (CIF) 

This program provides $600 per year to beneficiaries aged 19 through 24 to help with the cost of books and supplies associated with post-high school education and training. Beneficiaries submit receipts from the purchase of books and supplies for reimbursement.

Beneficiaries can receive up to four CIF awards. The RFC cannot reimburse receipts for tuition and fees. This program is open to the children of targeted activists and to targeted activist youth who fit within age guidelines. Beneficiaries can only receive one Carry It Forward Award per year.

Development Grants for Targeted Activist Youth (TAY)

This program provides targeted activist youth ages 18 to 24 with special development grants of up to $1000 per year to further their education, support their emotional needs or develop their organizing skills.

Targeted activist youth are eligible for a maximum of four of these grants (one per year) which are intended to support their development as activists and their transition to adulthood.

Attica Fund Prison Visit Program

This program provides funds (over and above the amount available for our Regular Granting, CIF or Special Travel programs) for children and youth up to age 24 to visit activist parents from whom they have been separated because the activist parent(s) has been imprisoned.

Beneficiaries can only receive one Attica Prison Visit Program grant per year.