Special Grants

Small Grants Fund
The Hill-Snowdon Small Grants Fund was established to provide organization with timely small grants to current HSF grant recipients to help respond to urgent and unanticipated events, unique opportunities or capacity building needs between grant cycles. Groups can apply for one-time discretionary grants of up to $5,000 per year between regular grant cycles. (Because the funds are limited we ask that applicants make every effort to calculate actual costs, rather than general requests for the full $5,000.). The Small Grants Fund is divided into two pools of funds, the Opportunity Fund and the Capacity Building Fund. To download the full guidelines click here.

Special Initiatives
(2004 Only) The Low Income Voter Empowerment Initiative - LIVE - was developed to support organizations that sought to increase the civic participation of low-income communities through non-partisan voter registration, mobilization, and education. While 2004 presidential and congressional elections served as the immediate backdrop for this initiative, the overall conceptualization of the LIVE initiative extended well beyond the elections. On its broadest level, Hill-Snowdon Foundation viewed LIVE as a means of supporting the development of an infrastructure to engage residents in low-income communities and "enLIVEn" their participation in the civic life of the communities. Civic engagement, specifically voting, was seen as a potentially important tool in achieving the evolving aim of HSF's Economic Justice, Program area - "community economic control."

We also have a Rapid Response Fund to provide support to local community organizations in the aftermath of major natural and other disasters, such as the Asian Tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Trustee Discretionary Grants
Each HSF Board member has a discretionary pool from which to make grants to organizations that support their personal interests. These grants may fall outside of the major focus of the Foundation overall and are made at the sole discretion of each Trustee.