Organization: Maine Philanthropy Center
Mission: To provide opportunity, leadership, and support to advance the effectiveness of philanthropy in Maine and its ability to make a meaningful difference.
Activities: MPC hosts a wide range of educational and professional development programs and webinars for grant makers to inform them about local and national trends in philanthropy, explore common issues, and promote best practice exchange, shared learning and collaboration. MPC staff also provides individual technical assistance as well as print and electronic information to its members about the field of philanthropy.In 2019, we hosted 2 events, our Spring Symposium "Partnerships for the Future: Working Together to Get Things Done and a Fall Forum "A Conversation with Edgar Villanueva." The symposium explored how organizations in the corporate, nonprofit, philanthropic, and government sectors are productively collaborating to make life better for people across the nation and right here in Maine, while the Fall Forum challenged nonprofits and grantmakers to decolonize their work. MPC is also building a more active focus on the role of the philanthropic community in advocacy on issues of importance to our sector. We continued our effort to raise awareness around Census 2020 and the role that funders can play to help assure a fair, accurate and complete count and supported the Maine Census Fund. MPC continues to encourage and support funder collaborations in early childhood, education, oral health and immigrant/refugee communities while also serving as the fiscal agent for the Environmental Funders Network (EFN). These groups exchange information, explore new ideas and consider joint/aligned funding opportunities. This year, EFN supported programs on climate change, aquaculture, and sponsored a funder tour of the Katahdin Region. The corporate funders group explored such topics as selecting pillars of giving and employee assistance programs.MPC offers services to help nonprofits enhance their grant seeking skills and potential such as monthly tutorials, monthly electronic grant advisories and the Directory of Maine Grant makers. The Maine Philanthropy Center promotes broad public awareness of philanthropy in a variety of ways including the publication of an annual Maine giving report, and a public website with local and national data about charitable foundations. Our Get on the Map project with funders is designed to further enhance our philanthropy reports by improving the accuracy and availability of current, detailed grant making data across our region.MPC is affiliated with the Foundation Center, a national nonprofit that tracks foundation information. Through this agreement, MPC maintains on-site library resources including public access to the Foundation Center's searchable national database of foundations. In 2019, we hosted 235 visits from nonprofit organizations who came to the USM library to research foundation information. In addition, MPC members can directly access the Online Directory of Maine Grant makers, a database of 391 funders that are active in Maine.
NTEE category: Community Improvement & Capacity Building
Secondary category: Philanthropy, Voluntarism & Grantmaking Foundations