Navigating Challenges and Opportunities in the Current Community Funding Landscape
We live in a generous and resource-rich community that quickly responded to the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Additional funds were made available to ensure our community’s nonprofit organizations were able to provide essential services and sustain operations during an unprecedented time.
Our nonprofit partners rose to the occasion, innovating to ensure community needs were met and our grantmaking practices shifted to be more responsive to emerging needs.
The easing of the pandemic health emergency brought with it a shifting landscape, with various provisions and supports coming to an end in the spring of 2023, compounding a demand on our human service organizations that provide essential crisis intervention services. This includes the non-renewal of advance child tax credit payments, the expiration of supplemental FoodShare benefits, and changes in Medicaid enrollment.
Those changes have ramifications on the communities we serve. Many other funders in our region are experiencing a high demand for funding support for a variety of community needs and capital campaigns.
All of this along with an increased awareness of historical disparities in access to care and services that need to be addressed.
| Did you know? The end of the Covid-19 health emergency triggered the discontinuation of crucial support measures including:
A reduction in available funding – the first such decrease since supplemental funding opportunities were made available in 2020 – compounds these challenges. |
As one year ended and a new one begins, the context of significant community and nonprofit sector challenges such as inflation, workforce shortages and retention, hiring challenges, economic uncertainties, and a reduction in federal, state and local funding sources have resulted in a significant increase in the funding requests from nonprofit organizations in our region.
Corporate and foundation funders and individual donors can help by providing long-term, unrestricted funding, acknowledging the importance of overhead costs, and supporting innovation and capacity building within nonprofits.
Your Donor Services Manager can work with you and our Community Foundation team to help you learn about the most pressing community needs, increase your support, or deepen your engagement with community organizations or causes you care about.
Jennifer Krikava
Jennifer Krikava is a Community Engagement Manager for the Community Foundation of the Fox Valley Region.
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