Ford Foundation to Give $25 Million to Support Workers Who Lack Labor Safeguards

Here are notable new grant awards compiled by the Chronicle:

World Central Kitchen

$50 million to its Climate Disaster Fund, which is aiming to raise $1 billion to deliver meals to communities that experience extreme weather events caused by the climate crisis.

The $50 million is funded in part by José Andrés, the celebrity chef who founded World Central Kitchen. In July, Andrés received $100 million as a personal gift from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in recognition of his charitable work.

Bloomberg Philanthropies

$25 million commitment to help young people develop the skills and training necessary to secure high-income jobs and recover from the financial fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic.

These career and technical-educational programs will be focused in nine U.S. cities and across Delaware and Texas.

Ford Foundation

$25 million to bolster global networks that support informally employed workers around the world, who are predominantly women and lack basic social and labor safeguards. This category includes domestic workers, home-based workers, street vendors, and waste recyclers.

Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

$12.1 million to 22 medical schools through the Covid-19 Fund to Retain Clinical Scientists competition, which supports early-career researchers in the biomedical sciences whose work was disrupted during the Covid-19 pandemic because of family caregiving responsibilities.

The American Heart Association, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the John Templeton Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation, and the Walder Foundation also contributed to the fund.

Minderoo Foundation

$10 million to create Minderoo Pictures, a production company that will make films about key social issues. The first four films in development focus on ocean conservation, plastics and human health, and early-childhood development in Indigenous communities.

Snap Inc.

$10 million to Georgia State University and California State University at Dominguez Hills to address racial-equity gaps in computing education.

Each university has received $5 million from this company, which operates the social-media app Snapchat.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

$9 million across 10 grants to diversify the pipeline of teachers, administrators, and education leaders in schools throughout the United States.

The largest grant of $2 million went to Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity to strengthen teacher-education programs at minority-serving institutions.

Walmart, Lumina Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Charles Koch Foundation

$6.3 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation for a variety of programs that help Americans find and keep jobs as U.S. businesses experience a worker shortage following the Covid-19 pandemic.

The programs include efforts to offer job-skills training that meet employer needs, use data technology to match the right workers with the right jobs, and reduce the cost of education and skills training for workers and students.

IBM

$5 million to Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering to endow two professorships in artificial intelligence and machine learning in honor of Virginia (Ginni) Rometty, who was the first woman to lead the technology company and retired as CEO last year. Rometty graduated from the university in 1979.

Henry E. Haller Jr. Foundation and Walther Cancer Foundation

$1.5 million to Purdue University to endow a professorship that will support the work of the Purdue Center for Cancer Research and the College of Science in cancer biology.

Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

$1.2 million to 10 theater organizations through Staging Change Detroit, the foundations’ program that supports efforts to reach new audiences and bolster arts and culture in Detroit.

Amazon

$1 million to the University of California at Los Angeles to establish the Science Hub for Humanity and Artificial Intelligence within its Samueli School of Engineering.

New Grant Opportunity

Morgan Stanley is accepting applications from nonprofit groups in New York and Baltimore for grants through its Strategy Challenge. The program expects to award cash grants, ranging from $5,000 to $25,000, as well as a 10-week consulting project to nine selected nonprofit groups, which will also receive pro bono volunteer hours from the bank’s employees to strengthen the organizations’ reach and impact. Applications are due December 14.

Send grant announcements to grants.editor@philanthropy.com.

Chronicle of Philanthropy subscribers also have full access to GrantStation’s searchable database of grant opportunities. For more information, visit our grants page.