COVID-19 Response
COVID-19 has created a global health and economic crisis that is testing all of us. At the Frey Foundation, we are continuously evaluating the role we play during this ambiguous time. We are actively exploring ways to continue to serve the community to the best of our ability.
Our commitment to affordable housing, health and human services, and education continues to guide our work and our response to this crisis. We know the long-lasting impacts of this situation are severe and unanticipated for our sector and grantee partners.
As such, the Frey Foundation remains steadfast in supporting our nonprofit partners as well as the people and communities hit hardest by the impacts of COVID-19. We are concentrating on the needs of our current partners as well as exercising additional flexibility in our grantmaking, while anticipating and planning for longer-term needs.
By providing flexibility to our grantee partners at this critical moment, we believe we can further enable and move their essential work, forward. To support this commitment, we have taken a Pledge of Action. Over the coming days, weeks, and months ahead, we pledge to:
Loosen or eliminate program related restrictions on current grants to unrestricted / general operating support.
Make new grants as unrestricted as possible to ensure partners have maximum flexibility to respond to this crisis.
Reduce what we ask of our nonprofit partners, postponing reporting requirements, site visits, and other demands on their time during this challenging period.
Contribute to community-based emergency response funds and other efforts to address this pandemic.
Communicate proactively and regularly about our decision-making and response to provide helpful information while not asking more of grantee partners.
Commit to listening to our partners and especially to those communities least heard, lifting up their voices and experiences to inform public discourse and our own decision-making.
Support, as appropriate, grantee partners advocating for important public policy changes to fight the pandemic and deliver an equitable and just emergency response for all.
Learn from these emergency practices and share what they teach us about effective partnership and philanthropic support, so we may consider adjusting our practices more fundamentally in the future, in more stable times, based on all we learn.
This crisis reminds us of our humanity and our interconnectedness as a community. We are confident that together, we will navigate through these unprecedented times.
*Note: Call to Action Pledge has been adapted from the Council on Foundations, 2020.