OVERVIEW: The Einhorn Collaborative has supported early childhood, parenting, K-12 education, and community work. It has recently restructured its giving priorities to fund more broadly and imaginatively.
IP TAKE: This funder builds strong relationships with its partners by working collaboratively with its grantees. Einhorn believes that society is “suffering from a crisis of connection” in an era of hyper-individualism, social isolation, partisanship, and hate.
While the foundation is not currently accepting unsolicited applications for grants, it is open to ideas and collaborative project proposals that may address its big questions. As a result, don’t hesitate to reach out to them with a brief introductory message if you have a project that aligns with their learning journey.
PROFILE: Established as Einhorn Family Charitable Trust in 2002, the Einhorn Collaborative seeks to address “America’s growing crisis of connection.” David Einhorn, the organization’s founder and trustee, is the founder of Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund. David has played an active role in New York City philanthropy, having served as a board member at the Michael J. Fox Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation and City Year. His wife, Cheryl, is a journalist who has served on boards at Facing History and Ourselves and the Solutions Journalism Network’s Advisory Board. The trust’s founding goal was to bring people from different social and cultural backgrounds together and to use “openness and kindness to solve our nation’s most difficult social problems.” Previous funding interests included all aspects of education, New York City, and violence prevention, but as the Collaborative has expanded, so too has its funding interests. It current focus areas include three broadly interconnected areas: Bonding, Bridging, and Building.
Grants for Early Childhood Education and Public Health and Access
Previous EC education grantmaking is varied and sought to address “bringing people together,” an ambiguous goal the foundation has doubled down on.
Falling under its Bonding initiative, the Collaborative’s parenting, early childhood, and pediatric health grants focus on helping parents and caregivers foster the healthy development of children in the early stages of life. Its Pediatrics Supporting Parents initiative works to leverage “pediatric well-visits as an opportunity to promote and support children’s social and emotional development and nurturing parent-child relationships.” Past grantees in the area of early childhood education include Jumpstart, which received funding for its language, literacy and social-emotional programs for preschool children in low-income communities; and Thirty Million Words, which received a grant for evidence-based interventions in early learning environments.
Grant amounts are often substantial, reaching to over $5 million. Most grants, however, have fallen in the $100,000 to $500,000 range. The Collaborative does not accept unsolicited grant applications or requests for funding.
Grants for K-12 Education and Higher Education
Einhorn’s Bridging initiative focuses “on providing adolescents with experiences to develop lifelong skills of perspective-taking and bridge-building.” It collaborates with Cornell University’s David M. Einhorn Center “to embed community-engaged learning into traditionally siloed academic and co-curricular experiences of every undergraduate across multiple colleges and campus life units.” Einhorn’s K-12 focus also actively seeks to develop “a collaborative with partners to nurture and support young people’s interest and ability to engage as active citizens, form positive relationships across difference, and proactively help America heal, repair, and rebuild.”
Past K-12 grantees include the Ashoka Start Empathy initiative, which received support for its program teaching empathy as a core skill, and School Retool, which received funding for its professional development fellowship for educators and school leaders. Past grantees include Cornell University, Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of California Berkeley and the University of Chicago.
Grants for Violence Prevention and Community Development
Einhorn’s Building initiative works to create “a more relational and pluralist culture in America to help people prioritize human connection, see our shared humanity, and embrace our differences.” It collaborates with other funders in its New Pluralists initiative, which is “focused on supporting the growing field of practitioners, storytellers, researchers, and innovators working to foster a culture of pluralism in America.” Grants through this initiative prioritize experimentation, collaboration, research, and the creation of practical resources.
Previous grantees in the violence prevention space included Futures Without Violence, which received support for its work ending violence against women and children; and Seeds of Peace, which received a grant for its work helping educators and young people build the skills and relationships crucial for peace-building.
Grants for New York City
While it is not a stated funding priority, Einhorn has supported groups and projects in New York City since its founding, and has given away hundreds of millions in grants. Past New York area grantees include Columbia University Medical Center, the Future Project, New York University, Storycorps and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Until it begins making grants again, the trust is engaging in “learning activities” to inform future strategies and welcomes input from nonprofits working in its past areas of interest. Grantees here tend to be established and large.
Grantmaking Insights:
Although Einhorn is not accepting unsolicited grant proposals, the Collaborative welcomes innovative ideas, suggestions, and solutions for ways it can “lift up the power of human connection.” It encourages grant seekers to contact it with ways the foundation can advance its “understanding of what it will take to address the crisis of connection.
In the past, Einhorn’s grants have ranged from $100,000 to several millions of dollars. This funder does not accept unsolicited grant applications or requests for funding, but encourages prospective grantees to share ideas via its website.
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