About the Foundation
The Charles Hayden Foundation is committed to expanding opportunities for young people and helping them build the knowledge, skills, experiences, and relationships they need to thrive in school, work, and life.
We support youth-serving nonprofit organizations and public district, charter, Catholic, and independent schools, as well as organizations that strengthen the capacity of those serving young people. Our grantmaking spans academic success, social and emotional development, post-secondary pathways, and career-connected learning, with an emphasis on programs and organizations that create meaningful opportunities and demonstrate positive outcomes for young people.
The Foundation primarily supports young people from low-income communities in New York City and Boston, with some grantmaking in Newark, New Jersey.
Our Grantmaking
The Foundation focuses its grantmaking in the following areas:
- Academic Readiness: Programs and initiatives that strengthen young people’s academic skills and provide access to educational, enrichment, and other learning opportunities that prepare them for future educational and career pathways.
- Social, Emotional, and Practical Skills: Programs and services that help young people develop the social, emotional, and practical skills they need to thrive in school, work, and life.
- Post-Secondary Success: College access and persistence efforts that prepare young people to pursue post-secondary opportunities, matriculate, persist, and successfully graduate.
- Career-Connected Learning: Opportunities that enable young people to explore their interests, gain exposure to careers, build real-world skills and experiences, and pursue meaningful career pathways.
- Organizational Capacity Building: Support for organizations that strengthen youth-serving nonprofits and schools through technical assistance, training, and other capacity-building services. This may include support in areas such as program quality and improvement, leadership and staff development, organizational strategy, data and evaluation, infrastructure, and other areas that strengthen organizational effectiveness and improve outcomes for young people.
How We Work
Our operating principles guide how we approach our grantmaking and our relationships with grantee partners.
- Adaptable: We understand the needs of youth-serving organizations, the youth they serve, and the communities they belong to will change and evolve over time.
- Collaborative: We cultivate long-term and reliable partnerships where we build and maintain deep trust between our staff and grantee organizations’ leadership.
- Endurance: We have a long history and tenure of supporting high-quality initiatives that yield significant outcomes for youth participants.
- Focused: We are a place-based, youth-centered funder with a deep emphasis and orientation towards learning about our grantees, their work, and the communities they serve.
- Responsive: We remain committed to being a lean, nimble, approachable funder. We eliminate unnecessary compliance so that our grantees can focus on their missions and impact on the youth they serve.
- Supportive: We embrace and embody principles of trust-based philanthropy, especially respect, humility, and partnership. It is important that our grantees feel championed, not scrutinized.