W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation
/OVERVIEW: The W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation supports professional development and policy toward the development of high quality, equitable educational opportunity for all children and youth.
IP TAKE: The Stone Foundation’s three grantmaking programs support youth across a broad range of areas, so there is plenty of opportunity here. While the Stone Foundation is not accessible, it is approachable and collaborative, so reach out at the contact information below.
PROFILE: Established in 1958, the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation was founded by author and insurance businessman W. Clement Stone and his wife, Jessie Stone. Based in Chicago, the foundation maintains an asset base of over $100 million and distributes almost $4 million in grants each year. It seeks to “work with great leaders doing promising work that has the potential for advancing the knowledge and practice in our grantmaking fields.” The foundation’s three current grantmaking programs are education, youth development, and early childhood development.
Grants for Early Childhood Education
The Stone Foundation’s early childhood development grantmaking program supports the development of a comprehensive and integrated childcare and early childhood education system. To these ends, the foundation makes grants to early childhood teacher education initiatives, policy development, research and innovative system design for early childhood education and care. Grantmaking has prioritized major urban areas across the U.S. In a recent year the foundation supported Boston’s Strategies for Children, which develops policy and conducts advocacy campaigns “to ensure that Massachusetts invests the resources needed for all children, from birth to age five, to access high-quality early education programs.” Other recent grantees include Illinois Action for Children, Philadelphia’s First Up and the Childcare Services Association of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which works to develop “a professional, educated and fairly compensated early childhood education workforce.”
Grants for K-12 Education
Stone’s education grantmaking program focuses on the preparation and development of “teachers and leaders who can promote equitable outcomes and the success of all students.” The foundation has also expressed interest in supporting initiatives for data-informed educational practices, social and emotional learning, ELL programs, special education, school culture and diversity. Recent grants supporting teacher and educational leadership development programs have gone to the Bank Street College of Education in New York, the Boston Plan for Excellence, California’s Learning Policy Institute, Partners in School Innovation and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Other grantees include Boston’s Center for Collaborative Education, which used funding to leverage policy for an overhaul of Massachusetts’s state educational assessment system, and the Education Trust, another Massachusetts organization that works at the state level to “increase opportunity and achievement for low-income students and students of color.”
Other Grantmaking Opportunities
The Stone Foundation also runs a youth development grantmaking program, which focuses on organizations that work with underserved youth in the areas of media, organizing, leadership and advocacy. Recent grants appear to prioritize out-of-school leadership development opportunities in major urban areas of the U.S. Grantees include New York City’s Center for Court Innovation’s Youth Justice Board, which involves young people in the drafting of solutions to current public safety challenges, and Chicago’s Mikva Challenge Citywide Youth Council Program, which develops youth leadership through the lens of public policy decisions that directly impact Chicago’s children and teens. Additionally, as part of its Youth Development grantmaking, Stone offers Stone Leaders for Change grants, which supports youth leadership organizations and provides scholarships to “increase the number of people working in early childhood development, or to increase the number of well-qualified teachers working in low-income inner-city schools, or to build leadership development in the field.”
In addition to its work in education and youth development, the Stone Foundation reserves a small portion of its grantmaking budget for its Field Building Grants, which are “designed to support rapidly moving and/or responsive projects that intend to build and strengthen one or more of the Stone funded fields.” Only previous Stone grantees are eligible for these grants. Stone also has a Special Opportunity Grants program that supports opportunities that may fall outside of the foundation’s programmatic areas or are otherwise atypical.
Important Grant Details:
Over the past several years, the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation has made between $3.6 and $5.2 million in grants a year. The foundation’s grants range from $40,000 to $100,000, with an average grant size of about $60,000. Trustee designated grants are generally awarded in amounts between $1,000 and $10,000. For additional information about past grantmaking see the foundation’s grants awarded pages.
This funder tends to work in urban areas, with more than half of all grants going to organizations in Chicago, Boston, New York and San Francisco. Its grantees tend to be well-established teacher development and policy development organizations. Recent grantmaking appears to prioritize initiatives for teacher preparation at both the early childhood and K-12 levels, as well as policy development for the improvement of childcare and education systems.
The Stone Foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals for funding. Instead, the foundation’s staff selects and contacts organizations to discuss possible grantmaking partnerships. General inquiries may be directed to the foundation via email or telephone at 312-366-2263.
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