Under the leadership of its new president, the Danforth Foundation will broaden its grant-making to include an additional emphasis on early-childhood programs and partnerships between school districts and social-service agencies.
The St. Louis-based foundation will also continue to award grants to staff-development and leadership-training programs for teachers and administrators, according to Bruce J. Anderson, who took over as Danforth’s president last November.
After a lengthy period of study, the foundation’s officers decided to devote more of its resources to programs focusing on prenatal care and early-childhood development, as well as the related area of preventing teenage pregnancy.
The foundation also hopes to fund more partnerships between school districts and community agencies.
“I think it’s high time we get away from the idea that schools and school districts can do everything that can be done for children,’' Mr. Anderson said in an interview last week.
“In an era of limited resources, it’s going to take a number of organizations and parties to focus on children and youth,’' he said.
The foundation awards all of its $8 million in grants each year to education-related projects. Its trustees meet twice a year, in May and in November. Mr. Anderson encouraged interested applicants to submit grant proposals either by early March or early September.
For more information, contact the Danforth Foundation at 231 South Bemiston Ave., Suite 1080, St. Louis, Mo. 63105-1996; telephone (314) 862-6200.
The National Center for Family Literacy in Louisville, Ky., announced last week the five new sites in the expansion of the Toyota Motor Corporation’s “Families for Learning’’ program.
Toyota awarded the center a $1.6-million grant in February to expand the program from 5 to 10 locations.
Selected from a pool of 360 applicants, the five winning cities are: Dallas, New Orleans, St. Louis, Seattle, and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Each city will receive $225,000 over the next three years to create new learning sites for the Toyota program, first launched with a $2-million grant from the automaker to the national center in 1991.
Local governments in the five cities will provide additional funding for the family-literacy programs, which help parents earn high-school-equivalency diplomas and learn workforce skills while their children attend preschool nearby.
Currently, 85 percent of the families participating in the existing programs have annual incomes less than $7,500, and 95 percent of the participating parents are women.
