Category Archives: Richard E. Tarrant

By the Numbers

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Each December, I prepare a huge batch of summary reports for our trustees.  This is good news for them, as we all tend to have nothing but free time and unassigned bandwidth that time of year.  Or … maybe not?  Nonetheless, we are data geeks, and this generally ends up among my favorite activities for us as an organization.

We look at data on all of the applications we receive, and how we have responded.  We consider what we have been asked to do around the state, and how that compares to our expressed strategy.  We analyze our investments, reviewing multiple years of data on which communities, demographic groups, and component strategies have received the most (and least) funding.  We talk about our decision-making process, and how we can continue to hone our work together to be the best possible stewards of the resources we have been given.

This year, I thought our partners around the state might like to see how some of the numbers shake out.  This isn’t everything we track, but it’s some of the bits we find most interesting.

To paraphrase Rich, we look at these numbers to help inform—but never to dictate or constrain—our future investment.  We learn from them, while staying flexible and open to how we might best partner within Vermont’s philanthropic community in the months and years to come.

BY THE NUMBERS (2015-2019)                                                                                                    

The Tarrant Foundation has been active in Vermont since 2005, investing more than $30 million since then in the charitable organizations, communities, and people of our state (Rich and Deb Tarrant have contributed more than $45 million in that time including their personal giving).  The statistics below represent a snapshot of the foundation’s activity, encompassing data from 2015-2019.

Community Grants Program

The Community Grants Program is one piece of the Tarrant Foundation’s grantmaking portfolio.  Each program within that portfolio has a distinct strategy, budget, and review process. The Community Grants Program is available exclusively to Vermont organizations, and accepts new submissions at any time.  Information on this program’s guidelines, strategic priorities, application requirements, and review timeline is available here.   

Total Dollars Requested[1]: $9,574,006
Average Dollars Requested per Year: $1,914,801
Biggest Year: $2,652,600 (2019)

Total Dollars Granted: $1,538,710
Average Dollars Granted per Year: $307,742
Biggest Year: $399,610 (2015)

Total Number of Requests Received[2]: 332
Total Number of Grants Made: 145

Total Site Visit Miles Driven[3]: 15,814
Biggest Year: 4,080 (2017)

Total Meals on the Road: 60
Favorite Road Meal: One in Every County
Biggest In-Car Road Meal Disaster: Also One in Every County

Counties where Percent of Dollars Awarded is Larger/Smaller than Percent of State Population:[4]

Larger than Population: Chittenden, Essex, Grand Isle, Orange, Washington, Windham
Smaller than Population: Addison, Bennington, Caledonia, Franklin, Lamoille, Orleans, Rutland, Windsor
[Note: Seven counties are within 2%; five other counties are within 5%. The greatest difference is in Washington County, where it is 7.6%.]

Demographics and Strategies

The Tarrant Foundation’s Community Grants Program focuses on the particular experiences of distinct demographic groups: Youth, Working-Age Adults, and Seniors (see the program’s Guidelines for more information).  The following statistics look at requests and grants in each of those broad categories, and at clusters of articulated needs and strategies within them.

Percent of Total Dollars Requested/Granted per Demographic Group:

Requests: Working-Age Adults (45%); Youth (38%); Seniors (17%)
Grants: Working-Age Adults (42%); Youth (37%); Seniors (21%)

Primary Strategic Focus of Requests/Grants per Demographic Group (in Dollars)[5]:

Youth:
Requests: Out-of-School Time (60%); Employment Readiness & Training (16%)
Grants: Out-of-School Time (86%); Addiction Recovery (5%); Employment Readiness & Training (3%)

Working-Age Adults
Requests: Housing (33%); Employment Readiness & Training (23%); Addiction Recovery (15%)
Grants: Housing (45%); Employment Readiness & Training (22%); Addiction Recovery (15%)

Seniors
Requests: Congregate & Delivered Meals (31%); Activities & Enrichment (19%); Home Health (15%)
Grants: Congregate & Delivered Meals (41%); Activities & Enrichment (21%); Housing Solutions (17%)

Number of Grants Awarded for General Operating Expenses: 50%

Full Grantmaking Portfolio

In addition to the Community Grants Program, the Tarrant Foundation manages a series of other initiatives.  Together, these programs comprise our full grantmaking portfolio.  Each program is discreet, and the partnerships involved feature substantially different strategies, levels of investment, anticipated impact, and evaluation protocols.  Currently, the foundation accepts unsolicited applications only in the Community Grants Program.  The statistics below derive from our full portfolio, again between 2015-2019.

Total Dollars Granted: $8,964,943
Biggest Year: $2,206,042 (2016)

Total Grants Made: 291
Biggest Year: 69 (2015)

Number of Grantees: 131
Grantees that Received an Award in All Five Years: 7

Average Percent of Total Assets Granted Annually: 24.3%

Foundation Overhead as Percent of Total Expenses: 7.9%

Number of Grantees that are Vermont Organizations: 87%
Dollars Invested in Vermont Organizations: 97%

Looking Ahead

In 2020, we expect to grow both our total budget (5.4%) and our Community Grants program (35.7%).  We look forward to learning more about important work taking place all around the state, to new partnerships, and to many more miles (and meals!) on the road.

If you have any questions about our grantmaking process, please let us know at (802) 857-0495 or info@tarrantfoundation.org.

Footnotes:
[1] Formal Letters of Interest only. Does not include capital campaigns, requests from out-of-state organizations, general appeals, or other solicitations.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Does not include miles within Chittenden County
[4] Applications are encouraged from all counties. Applications received are not in proportion to relative population.
[5] Only top 2-3 strategy types shown in each category.

Lauren A. Curry has served as Executive Director of the Richard E. and Deborah L. Tarrant Foundation since 2005.

In Honor of Allen and Bonnie Martin

Friday, October 2, 2015

Tarrant Foundation’s Gift to UVM Medical Center in Honor of Allen and Bonnie Martin from Tarrant Foundation on Vimeo.

Contributed by Richard E. Tarrant

Last night, Deb and Lauren joined me to announce a $1M grant from the Foundation to the University of Vermont Medical Center. The grant will go toward the construction of a new seven-floor inpatient facility. The building will include 128 state-of-the-art private patient rooms and other spaces critical to the growing needs of our community, and to delivery of the highest standard of care.

We have chosen to name the 5th floor of the new building, serving Oncology, Gynecology, Urology and General Surgery, in honor of two longtime friends of the hospital: Allen and Bonnie Martin.

Allen graduated from Williams College and went on to receive an honors degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University.  After Harvard law school and a prestigious clerkship, Allen ultimately became a partner at Downs Rachlin Martin, a law firm serving Vermonters and Vermont businesses for more than half a century.

In 1994, he became the driving force behind the formation of Fletcher Allen Health Care – one of the first integrated healthcare delivery systems in the country. Allen was the glue, pulling together physicians from the University Health Center, nuns from Fanny Allen, administrators at Mary Fletcher, and folks from the UVM College of Medicine. Imagine trying to bridge those many different interests, and to honor the pride of each player in the piece of that complicated puzzle that he or she represented. There was no road map, but Allen got it done.

Here’s a little story that embodies Allen.  One Sunday afternoon he was at home reviewing the pending federal Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1999 – because apparently that’s what lawyers do on a Sunday afternoon! He discovered a set of special provisions to increase Medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals serving rural communities by aligning them with nearby metropolitan areas.  It entailed a complicated body of work, but by the next morning Allen had drafted a provision that ultimately classified Chittenden County as part of the Greater Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area.  That alignment brought $5-$7M per year in additional reimbursements to Fletcher Allen … for more than ten years.

Because there were no additional costs related to those reimbursements, they equated to a contribution of over $50M from Allen’s Sunday afternoon bemusement.  In a way that makes Allen Martin the largest donor to the Medical Center in its history.

Allen made many other important contributions to the hospital over the years. He also served as a board member for IDX Systems Corporation, Union Mutual Insurance Company, and the Vermont Law School. Not bad for an Oxford philosophy major.

We mustn’t underestimate Bonnie’s impact on the softer side of things at the Medical Center. When the McClure building was new she helped fill it with artwork, expanding eventually to Baird and Shepardson as well. She also launched the hospital’s annual calendar of Vermont artwork, which brightens many of our walls still today.

Allen and Bonnie had an enormous impact on helping the Medical Center become what it is today. We are proud to name a floor in their honor.

I also want to take a moment to thank Jenna Page. Jenna is a multi-award-winning oncology nurse who spoke last night about the impact of the new building on patient care. She told heartbreaking stories about the added burden a lack of privacy can bring to cancer patients and their families when they are already suffering so much. Jenna had half the room in tears. We were blown away by her passion and her compassion, and are grateful for the work she and her peers do on behalf of us all.

We look forward to the day the new building is open to house medical staff, patients, and patient families.

Richard E. Tarrant is the President of the Tarrant Foundation.

Crunching Numbers

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Contributed by Lauren A. Curry

 

I love data.

More accurately, I love stories.  And to me, data tell some of the most compelling and important stories out there.

For instance:

These and other statistics about poverty, education, aging, and strong communities have informed our grantmaking over the past ten years.  In that time, we’ve engaged with partner organizations all over the state, working to turn around the bad statistics and build on the good ones … one grant at a time.

We’ve also tried to be good neighbors.  Knowing that we are one on a very short list of Vermont foundations, and recognizing the many, many people out there working hard on behalf of causes they believe in, we’ve made an effort to keep our doors wide open.  We’ve awarded grants to all kinds of different organizations supporting all kinds of different programs, all lumped under the large umbrella of improving the quality of life for people in Vermont.

Very large umbrella.  Perhaps overly large.

Since 2006, we’ve made grants to more than 350 different organizations.  In the last five years alone, we’ve issued upwards of 370 separate grant checks.  That’s a lot for a foundation our size.  Maybe too many.

We all know how the saying goes.  You can’t be all things to all people.  Much as we might like to try to be, no one is well served by that approach in the end.

Data stories matter.  And our data story tells us it’s time for a change.  It’s time to narrow our focus, and put more money into the grants that have proven to make the greatest difference in the work we most care about.

You can read more about our new strategy in the Community Grants section of our website.  In short, from here forward our Community Grants will focus on the following distinct populations and goals:

  • Youth: Resilience and Aspiration
  • Working-Age Adults: Employment and Financial Independence
  • Seniors: Comfort and Dignity in Aging
  • Communities: Local Resources and Investments

Under each of these headings, you will find that we have identified specific strategies as the focus for our investments.  We have done so based on our interests, and your data stories … on what our non-profit partners have taught us over the years are the most meaningful and cost-effective interventions.  We will concentrate our funds in these areas, and as ever will make grants with minimal restrictions to give organizations the flexibility and control they need to run the very best and most efficient programs.

The tradeoff here, of course, is that we’ve made some cuts.  Extremely valuable work is being done in areas that did not make our list, and we are grateful to other foundations, businesses and individuals that continue to invest in those areas.  We are committed, though, to funding programs that best fit our values and theory of change, and that demonstrate the kind of impact and cost efficiency we seek.

We have heard many times over the years that we “don’t act like a typical foundation”.  It has always been meant as a compliment, and frankly, we’ll take it.  We – and many of our peer foundations serving this state – approach this work with a deep sense of gratitude, a keen interest in true partnership, and a binding commitment to make the greatest impact we possibly can with the dollars we have.

While I understand not everyone out there will be happy with these changes, I trust that those who know us will see the thought, care, and discipline that went into them.

I’m thinking as I write about Deb’s belief that our Foundation can make a difference, and Rich’s powerful statement on being good stewards.  With these changes, I think we are doing just that.

                                                                                                                                               

Lauren A. Curry has been the Executive Director of the Richard E. and Deborah L. Tarrant Foundation since 2005.