To Our Friends and Colleagues

 

For much of the time since our founding in 1931, Rockwell Fund operated as a traditional responsive grant maker. As is often the case with family foundations, we were guided in the beginning by intuition and pragmatism. As our assets grew and professional staff was added, we increasingly employed tools of analysis and evaluation. In the early 2000s, we decided to reduce our number of grants in order to increase their average size, enabling us to be more purposeful and, consequently, to give grants large enough to make worthwhile the effort to obtain one.

Last year about this time we announced the suspension of our normal grantmaking in order to reflect on ways to increase our effectiveness. Here and throughout our website we describe the outcome of that process, but to summarize:

1. We have adopted an inquiry or “pre-application” process so that applicants don’t labor over a full-blown application before getting an indication of our interest in funding.
2. We no longer will provide funding in the following areas: the arts, museums, the environment, parks, historic preservation, libraries, capital projects and endowments.
3. We will continue to support those special initiatives that we have worked extensively with over the last several years: the Alliance of Community Assistance Ministries, the Community Clinic Initiative and the South Texas College of Law’s General Civil Clinic.

 

In addition to supporting these initiatives, we will concentrate our grant making in the following Issue Areas:

• Community Health, concentrating on health issues that affect the broader community, including mental and behavioral health;
• Education, concentrating on dropout prevention strategies that target the intermediate and middle school years;
• Employment, concentrating on training/placement and jobs creation/enterprise development opportunities; and
• Supportive Housing, concentrating on affordable housing coupled with onsite, sustained services to support individuals and families in achieving self-sufficiency.

We maintain our interest in advocacy and capacity building as Supporting Strategies that further our Special Initiatives and Issue Areas.

Finally, we emphasize that our introspection is an ongoing, organic process that will continue to reflect our experiences with our community’s funders and service providers and the people and organizations that support them. We are strong believers in the potential that collective impact holds for Houston, and we are excited about participating in this process with you.