Grant Application Improvements

The Beveridge Family Foundation has made incremental improvements to our grant application process.

In May 2026 we removed the categories of funding and organization from the eligibility pages. In October 2025 we removed the eligibility screening of non-priority support types. In May 2025 we have removed outdated questions from the eligibility form as well as the 990 questions from the application.

The goal is to improve efficiency, transparency, and fairness. Please reach out with any questions.

Details of Changes Made

First, we have removed several questions from our eligibility form. This is the form you see after reviewing our eligibility guidelines and FAQ. It is the first gatekeeper in the process. Its purpose is to save time for applicants whose requests do not meet our policies. It includes a section of checkboxes with the heading “Select any of the following that apply:” The following options are being removed.

1. Federated drives and their foundations including Catholic Charities, United Jewish Appeal and the United Way.
2. Units of government including federal, state, county and municipal agencies, schools, colleges, universities and hospitals and their foundations
3. Organizations that are located outside the geographically approved area of giving
4. Private educational institutions not attended by members of the Beveridge Family

Despite the removal, please be aware that some restrictions still exist.

We still do not directly fund government agencies. We do however fund colleges, universities, and hospitals. Sometimes this funding is through their associated foundations as in cases where the universities are part of the Massachusetts educational system and are applying for projects of specific benefit to communities in Hampden and/or Hampshire counties.

We do indeed fund organizations based outside Western Mass, but only for projects operating inside our two-county area.

Also, in the eligibility form we are removing the question “Does your organization have a grant from the Beveridge Family Foundation being paid currently.” In concert we have clarified the question “Has your organization received any grant payment, other than discretionary distributions, from the Beveridge Family Foundation within the last two years?”

The new wording is “Has your organization received any grant payment greater than $5,000 from the Beveridge Family Foundation within the last two years?”

We provide discretionary grants at the specific recommendation of our directors, usually in amounts of $5,000 or less. Our grant application program is part of what we term our “General” grants. The two-year restriction refers only to our general grants. We recognize that our internal nomenclature of general vs discretionary will not be entire familiar to our applicants, so we hope this new wording is clearer.

We removed the 990 section from the initial application form which contained nine entries from the applicants’ IRS tax return form 990. For applications that are accepted for consideration, the 990 will be uploaded and therefore these questions are unnecessary. We also recognize that churches, and smaller nonprofits filing the short form or post card version of the 990 do not have these numbers available.

We reduced our focus on categories and types of support considered. We recognize that the lists of these areas were cumbersome and outdated and have yet to find an adequate replacement. Since we fund nearly all types of programs and projects in Western Mass, we elected to allow formerly ineligible support types to apply and eliminated the importance of those categories in our selection process. Note that we kept the lists on the eligibility screener as a data collection tool, but it is no longer used in the screening.

In October 2025 and April 2026 the following changes were made: