What will you do to prepare a highly qualified workforce for our region? Or to make sure that we encourage diversity in our leadership and shared purpose among our many different communities? How can we build on the strengths of our geography and our climate? These are just a few of the questions awaiting our…
The Birmingham Business Alliance unveils Blueprint Birmingham from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 23 at Railroad Park. The plan is the long-awaited result of the hard work by this dynamic organization, designed to bring the strengths of the Metropolitan Development Board and the Chamber of Commerce together to move our community forward. Join us…
Railroad Park officially opened last night at a great event, complete with a band, butterflies and luminaries. Today at lunch it was filled with a great mixture of people, young, old, black, white, definitely not some set of “usual suspects” but all the great folks who find their way to downtown Birmingham during the week….
March 15 and September 15 have always been big days in the Community Foundation calendar, because that’s when we see the final proposals for two rounds of competitive grantmaking to our great nonprofit partners. This is the place where the planning and proposing ends and the evaluation begins, as our Program staff reads through every…
The fences are down and the welcome mat is out at our long-awaited Railroad Park, 19 acres in the heart of downtown Birmingham. If you haven’t wandered down First Avenue South lately, you are in for a real treat when you see what has been created on these four blocks between 14th and 18th Streets….
Our next generation of health professionals has graduated to a new level of experience and inspiration, thanks to a leadership program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with local collaboration from your Community Foundation. Twenty men and women completed the national Ladder to Leadership program at the end of August and now move ahead…
We had a great first year Artists As Educators, an initiative of the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham that started with seed funding from your Community Foundation and got an early boost through a powerful partnership with Birmingham City Schools. Last week, the work of teachers and teaching artists was recognized on a national level…
The President and CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation, Albert Ruesga, recently reflected on his memories of how far his city has come in the five years since the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. The same is surely true for other philanthropic leaders along the Gulf Coast, especially as they deal with new needs…
Are you waiting to give back to your community after your business is more securely established? While that is an important factor to consider, there are reasons to put philanthropy into your business plan from the beginning, as a recent article in Inc. suggests. Whether you donate time or resources, you can gain good will…
Our sister community foundation up in New York recently ran an ad with this question: Why let the billionaires have all the fun? For anyone who has been following the Giving Pledge challenge issued by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, this line speaks to the appeal of creating our own charitable legacy. Working with community…