Youth Development Funding

Finding and Working with Funders: Tips and links on grant seeking, grant writing, and developing relationships with funders.

Grants for Nonprofits: Children and Youth: This extensive list of links to foundations with an interest in youth is maintained by Michigan State University Libraries.

Planning to Sustain Your Community Initiative

Financing is only one aspect of sustainability planning. For a youth development initiative to create lasting change, organizations and community institutions must embrace a youth development approach from the inside out. This isn't easy work--it takes vision, planning, persistence, and outreach, often on the level of one-to-one mobilization. The resources below give examples and tools to help you plan to make a lasting difference.

Community Partnerships for Healthy Children (Sierra Health Foundaton): Through the Community Partnerships for Healthy Children initiative, the Sierra Health Foundation sought to “invigorate communities, unleash local resources, and lead to sustained solutions.” Based on many years of experience, they offer these resources for community initiatives:

Community Toolbox : The Tool Box provides practical information to support your work in promoting community health and development. Topics include leadership, strategic planning, community assessment, grant writing, and evaluation, among others. Each section includes a description of the task, step-by-step guidelines, examples, checklists of points to review, and training materials.

The Finance Project offers many resources for non-profit sustainability planning, including:

Program Evaluation and Resource Center (PERC): This comprehensive site offers tutorials and tools on program planning and evaluation. PERC also maintains a calendar of training events and lectures relevant to program planning and evaluation.