Caring For Colorado Grant Program: Healthy Beginnings, Healthy Youth and Strong and Resilient Families Focus Areas

_NOTE:  Caring For Colorado Grant Program: Public Policy Advocacy focus area can be found [here]()._

Our Approach

With optimism and dedication, we work to improve the lives of children and families in Colorado through collaboration, partnership, shared knowledge and grantmaking. We take a long-term view of our work as we seek to address root causes, promote prevention, improve systems and advance policy change.

Focus Areas

Caring for Colorado’s vision is that Colorado’s children and families are happy, healthy and thriving and our purpose is creating equity in health, well-being and opportunity for Colorado’s children and families. Given this, we focus our grantmaking in four primary areas.

We want Colorado’s children to have healthy beginnings — brain development is most rapid in the first three years of life and early experiences and relationships have significant impact on health and well-being.

We believe promoting youth-friendly services, centering youth voice and addressing systemic inequities are foundational to the healthy development of youth.

Adolescence is a time of significant brain, body and emotional growth. The changes in brain structure and connectivity that occur between the ages of 10 and 25 present important opportunities for positive, life-shaping development, and for recovering from past adversity.

Strong & Resilient Families

We believe all families need support and deserve equitable access to resources that nurture development, behavioral health, stability and healthy relationships.

Families need support to provide stable and responsive environments for children to grow. Children deserve to have safe and happy experiences throughout their childhood and adolescence and to grow up to have full adult lives.

Eligibility

_You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website._

• Caring for Colorado will consider applications from and awards to organizations who benefit Colorado and are:
• Charitable nonprofit organizations with tax-exempt classification from the Internal Revenue Service; or
• Tax-supported institutions including state and local governments and schools.
• Please note: New or emerging organizations are permitted to apply through a tax-exempt organization acting as fiscal agent.
  • The most common type of fiscal agent arrangement is between a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization and a non-tax-exempt group.
  • The fiscal agent has the ultimate authority and responsibility to see that the funds are used for the purpose intended; it cannot simply be a pass-through organization.

Ineligibility

• Caring for Colorado does not fund:
• For-profit entities.
• Annual appeals or membership drives.
• Financial support for political candidates.
• Scholarships.
• Camps.
• Sports programs.
• Fee-based programming without a robust sliding scale.
• Pregnancy resource centers.
• Research (costs specifically associated with the research process such as design, investigation or analysis).