Children deserve to be loved and nurtured.
OUR PHILOSOPHY OF GIVING
The Ohio Children's Foundation is a grant-making charity that has awarded more than $13 million to hundreds of organizations working to enhance the lives of children and their families.
We believe it is important that children be allowed to be children during their early, formative years. They deserve to be loved and nurtured by their families, in their schools, and by the communities in which they live. Children should be free from poverty, hunger, fear, and violence. Childhood should be a time to learn how to make good choices, to explore life's many pathways, and to understand and appreciate diversity in others.
Throughout its history, the Foundation has awarded grants to local, state, and national advocacy organizations focused on improving children’s lives. These organizations work with communities, the media, service providers, elected officials and policy-makers to create more favorable environments for children through changes in laws, policies, and public funding. Their efforts may result in expanding eligibility for existing programs and services or creating new ones where none exist. The Foundation is proud to have been part of initiatives which decreased the number of uninsured children in Ohio, retained millions of dollars in the state budget for home visiting services to families, involved local law enforcement leaders in opposing budget reductions in early childhood education, and created public funding streams for quality early childhood education programs.
Matt Miller, a columnist with The Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, writes:
Anyone who’s spent any time around foundations eventually realizes two things. First, there is no shortage of good works to be done, and foundations are doing plenty of it. Second, the impact of direct philanthropy pales next to the impact of shaping more effective and efficient uses of the vastly larger public resources available to government.
For this reason, farsighted philanthropists all come to realize that advocacy–i.e., efforts to shape how public resources are utilized–offers the best possible bang for the charitable buck.