Community Impact Grants

Community Impact Grants is sponsored by Greater New Orleans Foundation. The Greater New Orleans Foundation offers various community impact grants to improve the lives of people in the Greater New Orleans area, addressing areas like arts & culture, education, and the environment.

IMPACT | Greater New Orleans Foundation To support the region in the following categories: arts & culture, education, youth development, health, and social services. Thank you for your past interest in the Greater New Orleans Foundation’s IMPACT grantmaking program. We deeply appreciate the work you and your organization do to strengthen our community, and we are grateful for your partnership over the years.

When IMPACT launched in 2009, the Foundation was able to award $1,000,000 in grants, with an average grant size of $20,000. Over time, as these initial funds were fully deployed and demand for the program continued to grow, the Foundation found itself making many smaller grants that, while meaningful, were often not large enough to achieve the level of impact we strive for through our grantmaking.

In 2017, in response to declining available dollars, the Foundation updated the IMPACT program to allow general operating support grantees the opportunity to renew their grants for up to two additional years. Since then, the Foundation has supported five cohorts of renewal grants, deepening our investment in organizations demonstrating strong outcomes and community impact.

In recent years, the Foundation has made significant investments to support our region’s recovery from COVID-19, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other disasters, while also navigating challenges in the investment market. As a result, resources available for IMPACT have remained limited. In the program’s most recent iteration, only 17 percent of applicants were able to be funded.

Recognizing that this level of competitiveness was not serving nonprofits—or the community—as effectively as possible, the Foundation paused the IMPACT program in 2023 to thoughtfully redesign it in a way that aligns available resources with the growing needs of our region. As we move forward, the IMPACT program will now operate on an invitation-only basis.

This approach reflects best practices in philanthropy by allowing the Foundation to make deeper, more strategic investments in organizations that align closely with our strategic priorities, informed by learning, relationships, and community knowledge. An invitation-only process does not mean that organizations will lose opportunities to connect with the Foundation.

Our programmatic team remains deeply committed to staying engaged with nonprofits across the region by spending time in the community, convening organizations for coordination, learning, and relationship building, and networking with our philanthropic peers and partners.

We have also launched a Nonprofit Mission and Impact Form on the grants page of our website where organizations are able to share information on their organizations and efforts. Thank you again for all that you do to serve our community. If you have questions about this update, please contact us at grants@gnof.

org . You can access the database, for free, at the Foundation – 919 St. Charles Avenue.

The database is only accessible in person. You can reserve a time to search here .