Voices of Youth: A Series of Grantmaking Competitions

Identifying Community Issues
The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Grable Foundation came together to bring focus on the issues that impact the lives of children and youth. In 2009, these organizations committed to enhancing the quality of life for children and youth in the community. To advance that goal, over the next year, we plan to offer three competitions. Each will be designed to generate citizen engagement around the issues of mobilizing community will and energy to address issues that impact the lives of children and youth in this region.

The theme for the first competition is titled “Voices of Youth,” as we have generated three questions that we believe will encourage our community to give voice to children and their concerns, while drawing attention to the impact of important social issues on the lives of children and families.

Grantmaking as Civic Engagement
The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Grable Foundation recognize that in order for civic engagement to be most effective, we must not only listen to the input from our constituents, but we must be prepared to create opportunities for the public to act in accordance with their priorities and values. To this end, we would like to invite the public to provide input on community issues, create new solutions and cast their vote in support of the innovative ideas.

Our goal for the online grant competition is to utilize technology to provide new opportunities for individuals and organizations to create projects that respond to a series of critical issues that arise both from our knowledge of regional challenges and the feedback we have received from our multiple stakeholders and constituents. Following the lead of our philanthropic colleagues at the Case Foundation in Washington, D.C. and the Changemakers.net project, we have developed an online grantmaking competition as a way to encourage public input in the process of involving citizens in generating, then reviewing and selecting innovative responses to critical community issues.

Philanthropy in Our Community
The Grable Foundation and The Pittsburgh Foundation, as well as our philanthropic colleagues, focus our efforts to assure that all of our citizens, particularly those among us who are most vulnerable, can benefit from and participate in a just and sustainable society. We recognize that our region faces serious challenges as we try to make these goals a reality. Yet, we believe that while our challenges are real, our capacity to address them is equally real. Through an affirmative inquiry approach where we emphasize our strengths and our assets, communities can be mobilized and can begin the process of creating change.

We believe that philanthropy can play a role, in partnership with the nonprofit and public sectors, in encouraging citizen engagement by providing resources and by creating a forum that allows citizens to work together to capitalize upon the region’s strengths. Such a forum will draw upon the character, creativity, and courage of its citizens to envision new approaches, new ideas and new responses to the issues facing our region. The online grantmaking competition is designed to support these new and innovative responses.