Foundation Beyond Belief announces new Small Grant awardees

Our Small Grants program was recently revamped to allow us to identify organizations and programs that were either not being funded by our Humanist Giving Program, or were being underfunded. The process of choosing an awardee begins with nominations from our staff and board members. Next, the Humanist Giving staff researches and evaluates nominated programs based on our current best practices. Our debut awardee under the new system was presented at the Humanism at Work conference in July: We were thrilled to be able to honor Responsible Charity, run by Hemley Gonzalez and his extensive Kolkata-based staff, for their work. 

During Q3 2014, we chose to issue a Humanist Crisis Response drive addressing the needs of the increased number of unaccompanied  children crossing the United States border from Central America. We find that crisis response drives for an ongoing or lengthy crises, such as the drive for unaccompanied children at the U.S. border and our recent drive for Syrian refugees, tend to raise less money than crisis response drives for natural disasters and other sudden events. During any crisis drive, we find that education regarding the crisis is generally as important as the financial aspects of the drive. In this case, however, Foundation Beyond Belief staff were in agreement that this crisis would benefit from more financial support than our crisis drive was able to raise, and our crisis beneficiaries will use these resources for their current programming easily and responsibly. 

The Q3 2014 Small Grant awardees are our two chosen beneficiaries for the Unaccompanied Children at the Border Humanist Crisis Response drive: KIND (Kids in Need of Defense) and the Florence Immigration and Refugee Rights Project. This award will be combined with monies collected during the drive to increase the support to these organizations.