Eight Nonprofit Groups Win MacArthur Fund’s Awards to Honor Creativity and Effectiveness

Nonprofit groups that promote human rights in Russia, protect the environment in Madagascar, and improve public radio in the United States are among the winners of a foundation prize recognizing the contributions of small, adept organizations around the world.

Eight nonprofit groups — three in the United States and five abroad — will each receive up to $500,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, as this year’s winners of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

The award, first handed out in 2006, was created as a counterpart to the foundation’s renowned fellows program, often called the genius prize.

“MacArthur has been known for its recognition of creative individuals,” says the foundation’s president, Jonathan Fanton. “With these new awards, we wanted to also celebrate and support creative institutions, especially small ones that make a huge difference.”

Like the fellows program, there is no application process — any nonprofit organization with an annual budget of less than $2.5-million that has ever received a MacArthur grant is eligible — and the money comes with no strings attached. Foundation program officers nominated the charity winners from a pool of more than 1,000 eligible organizations.

Improving Data Collection

This year’s award winners say they will use the money for a variety of purposes, including buying new office space, expanding their ability to do research, and establishing a reserve fund.

Project Match, a Chicago group that studies work-force trends and runs programs to help keep low-income people employed, will use some of its prize to improve its data gathering. For example, the group plans to hire a consultant to better collect and analyze information about clients in its work programs.

PRX Public Radio Exchange, in Cambridge, Mass., which provides independently produced programming to public radio stations around the country, will spend some of its money improving its software and other technology capabilities. Among other efforts, the group wants to allow its Web-site users to be able to create their own playlists of audio pieces — from the more than 20,000 available — thus helping to curate and organize collections of works for use online or for broadcast.

The MacArthur foundation will award a total of $2.4-million in this year’s prizes, $350,000 each to the winning groups with annual budgets of less than $1-million, and $500,000 each to the groups with budgets between $1-million and $2.5-million.

Along with Project Match and PRX, the other winners were: Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montana, a human-rights group in Mexico; the Juvenile Law Center, in Philadelphia; the Kazan Human Rights Center, in Russia; the Legal Defence and Assistance Project, in Nigeria; Sangath, a mental-health organization for children in India; and the Tany Meva Foundation, an environmental group in Madagascar.