The Morrison & Foerster Foundation Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary with $2.1 Million in Special Project Grants for Youth Charities

(September 23, 2024) – The Morrison & Foerster Foundation, one of the oldest law firm-affiliated charitable foundations in the United States, today announced the largest set of grants in its history, in recognition of its upcoming 40th anniversary. The MoFo Foundation is celebrating the milestone with $1.7 million in large Special Project Grants for nonprofit organizations broadly serving disadvantaged youth and families. Additionally, the MoFo Foundation will donate $400,000 to another 10 youth and community-focused nonprofit organizations. This year’s Special Project Grants recipients include organizations whose programs tackle a range of issues facing youth, including educational equity and innovations, migrant children and families, food insecurity, and mental health services.

“Giving back to our local communities through significant, meaningful donations is central to Morrison Foerster’s values as a firm, and our longstanding commitment to community service,” said Jamie Levitt, chair of the Morrison & Foerster Foundation. “The Foundation Board is thrilled to honor our upcoming 40^th anniversary by pledging Foundation support to this set of impactful organizations who dedicate their time and resources to helping meet the critical unmet needs of disadvantaged young people, giving them tools and hope for a successful future.”

The 40th Anniversary Special Project Grants Program represents the MoFo Foundation’s fifth set of special grants, following similar $1 million programs in 2003 and 2006, a $1.5 million program to celebrate its 25th anniversary, and a $1.3 million program for its 30th anniversary in 2016. Additionally, since its inception, the MoFo Foundation has donated close to $80 million to a wide variety of nonprofit organizations that address social welfare and discrimination through programs focused on legal aid, civil rights, and equity in education, healthcare, and housing.

The organizations, which were nominated by Morrison Foerster lawyers and employees and chosen by the Foundation to receive funds from this year’s Special Project Grants Program, are as follows:

• $225,000 to Advocates for Children of New York, which will assist in the addition of a Bilingual Education Advocate to provide direct assistance to migrant families living in shelters who are experiencing barriers to a quality public education.
• $150,000 to Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City, which will aid in the expansion of its College & Career Success program, providing college- and career-focused mentorship to 75 to 200 underserved and first-generation scholars.
• $100,000 to D.C. Central Kitchen, which will help double the reach of a contract awarded by the District of Columbia Public Schools to provide nutrition education, establish in-school food pantries, and provide meals in and out of school for children from low-income communities.
• $225,000 to De Novo Center for Justice and Healing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which will augment a program to provide coordinated legal assistance and ancillary mental health services for immigrant children and youth in the Greater Boston area who have survived violence, poverty, and severe abuse. This assistance will include helping them maintain legal status in the United States.
• $200,000 to Dream Project in the Virginia/D.C. Area, which will help launch a pilot program to offer undocumented immigrants scholarships and mentoring for community college certificate programs and/or trade professions training Career and Technical Education (CTE).
• $200,000 to A Home Away from Homelessness in San Francisco, which will expand access to mental health and structured support for 6th–12th grade program participants by combining the position of mental health provider with case management and wellness for weekly individual therapy and social-emotional learning opportunities.
• $150,000 to Integrated Brilliant Education in Hong Kong, which will help establish a kindergarten to teach Hong Kong’s Chinese language curriculum to ethnic minority students who are marginalized and underserved by the public education system.
• $150,000 to the Oakland REACH, which will help create a new curated mobile tech platform, inREACH, that provides supplemental academic support to help accelerate learning and close the achievement gap for low-income children of color in Oakland, California.
• $150,000 to Partners for Justice to expand its Parent Defense Project, embedding a Family Law attorney in California Public Defenders Offices to provide legal support that ranges from advice and counsel to direct representation in criminal court proceedings, with a goal of keeping families together.
• $150,000 to Scientific Adventures for Girls in Berkeley, California, which will help expand a 27-week afterschool STEM program for girls to three new Title 1 schools in the Oakland, California area that currently do not have access to STEM programming.

In addition to the large Special Project Grants, the Foundation will award ten $40,000 grants to: Black Girls Code; Community Alliance for Special Education; Lawyers for Children; Minds Matter NYC; Network for Victim Recovery; Project Glimmer; Roots & Wings; Royal Institute for Deaf & Blind; Starlight Children’s Foundation; and WY Equality.