News

Courtesy of: Los Angeles Public Library

Cultivating Hope Through Action: How Public-Private Partnerships Are Strengthening Child and Family Well-Being in L.A. County

Government and philanthropy often share common goals and a capacity to enable wide-scale systems change. When they work together, they make ideal partners—philanthropy contributing nimbleness and a spirit of experimentation, while government commands the resources to sustain what works. In Los Angeles County, such collaboration was catalyzed by the murder of an 8-year-old boy in 2013. This tragic death prompted the Board of Supervisors to empanel a commission of notable child welfare experts to examine systemic failures. Since then, an increasingly durable and agile spirit of collaboration in L.A. has fueled an ability to test new ideas, assess their effectiveness,...
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Announcing the LA Arts Recovery Fund

Dear Grantee Partners and Colleagues: We are delighted to announce that The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and more than a dozen local and national funders have launched the LA Arts Recovery Fund, a $38.5M private pooled investment for the arts sector in LA. The Fund will offer competitive grants providing significant flexible operating support to small and medium-sized arts organizations across LA County, and we wanted to make sure you were aware of this opportunity.  The California Community Foundation (CCF) is hosting an informational webinar with time for Q&A from 9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Wednesday, February 17th. The application portal...
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A Message from the Chair, Board of Directors and President & CEO

Our beloved nation and community of Los Angeles are responding to the overlapping and interconnected traumas of COVID-19 and structural racism. While one crisis came into view within recent months, the other has plagued us for centuries. COVID-19 has devastated communities and laid bare the deep inequities within our society, while the brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others have highlighted our nation’s sustained legacy of racial injustice. We as a community must do better. We at The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation can do more. Over the past few weeks, we have been listening and...
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Our Response to COVID-19

Dear Grantee Partners and Colleagues, On behalf of the Board and staff of The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, I want to express our deepest gratitude to all of you in the nonprofit and public sectors who are working diligently to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.  We recognize the profound impact this has already had on each of you, both personally and professionally.  Like you, we are trying to understand what this moment means for our community, our team, and the LA nonprofit sector as a whole.  We know that there are immediate impacts as well as long term considerations. We...
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2019 Grantee Perception Report

In 2019, The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation worked with the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to conduct a Grantee Perception Report.  This survey was our third, and we were eager to hear from you all again, following our most recent survey in 2015.   I want to express my personal gratitude to all of our grantees who participated.  We are grateful that so many of you took the time to complete this anonymous survey and we appreciate your candid feedback. Overall, we had a higher than average response rate of 76%, representing 384 organizations.  Our grantees provided us with meaningful comments...
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