Please note that as of 2023, Footprint is changing its grantmaking strategy and will not be making new grants until a new strategy and process has been (re)defined. Please read on for more.

WHY ARE WE CHANGING?

The Footprint Foundation was formed in 2012 when the Lyndhurst Foundation reorganized to create a new community-led board. The reorganization spun off five smaller family foundations, including the Chattanooga-based Footprint Foundation. Now, after 10 years of working together as a family, we are rethinking how the foundation’s capital may best be used to support true systems change.

We respect the work of generations before us but know there are many injustices in the systems that allow foundations to exist.

We are exploring how we remedy those injustices by using our institutional power, financial resources, and privilege differently. So, we are taking a hard look at both our grantmaking and investing strategies and ways in which we can and should be more inclusive, specifically how we shift our power and capital to those closest to the work we want to support.

HOW ARE WE CHANGING?

We’ve started by studying the ways we’re seeing philanthropy change across the country, moving away from a charity to a change/liberation mindset and by acknowledging our part in the broken, dominant systems that exist in our culture.

We spent most of 2022 engaging in conversation and dialogue with our Buzz network about the idea of a new community-centered approach, inviting them to co-create a new process - a new “way” - with us, and giving them the power to identify and define the changes they’d like to see in our philanthropic practices. This process has been open and iterative - and meant to give space for new ideas, connections, and roles to emerge.

We hope to have a newly defined direction in place some time in 2024 and will not be making grants until the co-creation/planning process is complete.