Please note that given our priorities and committed resources to current partners and initiatives in 2011, we are not accepting unsolicited applications.  When making decisions about what to fund, we look for projects that are geared to the Foundation's priority areas:   Early Learning and Child Care: Innovative projects that demonstrate how to improve the futures of children and youth at risk through more effective early years programming and policies.   Poverty Reduction: Innovative projects--including community organizing, research and educational activities—geared to increasing community and policy capacity to tackle poverty.    The Canadian Index of Wellbeing: A new approach to measuring how Canadians' lives are getting better – or worse – in areas that matter: health, standard of living, quality of the environment, time use, education and skills, community vitality, civic engagement, and arts and culture.   In addition, we look for partnerships that share the following features: 1. Directly improve the economic and social opportunities of Ontario's disadvantaged people. 2. Are radical and innovative; we are interested in ideas and projects that challenge current attitudes, policies and approaches, and that not only identify but attempt to address the systemic reasons for economic and social injustice. 3. Enable disadvantaged or marginalized communities to have more power over their lives. We favour projects that offer disadvantaged people the tools to take more control over their lives, and to help shape the policies that affect them. 4. Promote individuals' and/or communities' understanding of and action on the issues that affect Ontario's disadvantaged people.  We like projects that encourage citizens within the broader community to respond or get involved in the issues affecting the disadvantaged. 5. Are likely to yield policy implications. We prefer projects that generate ideas and/or results that could be useful to public policy makers. 6. Effectively develop and use partnerships. We favour projects that promote cooperation among community groups, government and non-government agencies, religious organizations, media, business and industry, and other foundations. 7. Make use of existing resources.  We are partial to projects that find innovative ways to use and maximize existing resources (e.g., people, equipment, facilities, and partnerships). 8. Contain plans for evaluation/continuous learning during the life of the project. 9. Contain plans for dissemination of results and communications impact. We favour projects that consider how people will be made aware of the project's results in a way that enables other groups, individuals and policy makers to learn from and build upon the knowledge gained. 10. Continue to have an impact after the grant is expended. We are interested in projects that will have lasting impact or can be sustained in some form beyond the life of the grant. 11. Are initiated by organizations actively committed to issues of equity and inclusion. FUNDING LIMITATIONS The Atkinson Charitable Foundation can provide grants only to Ontario-based organizations that are registered charities.  We do not provide support for capital expenses (furniture, equipment, computers, automobiles, building construction or renovations etc.), core funding or operating costs for ongoing activities of an organization; deficits; or annual campaigns or project expansions. HOW TO APPLY Normally, we would ask that before you decide to apply for a grant, you take the time to consider whether it is the type of project we fund.  Then we would ask you to call us and tell us about your project idea to assess whether to move to the next stage of drafting an outline of the proposal. However, please note that given our priorities and committed resources to current partners and initiatives in 2011, we are not accepting unsolicited applications.