The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation currently focuses its efforts and resources on strengthening youth-serving organizations so they can help more young people from low-income backgrounds make a successful transition to independent adulthood. The Program for Youth Development began in 2000 and now is the Foundation’s sole grantmaking initiative.

This strategy follows a rich, 30-year legacy of programs that sought to improve the lives of low-income people and others with limited opportunities.

Following the Foundation’s creation in the early 1970s, its board agreed to focus initial grants on the poor, children, the elderly, and the developing world. These early efforts evolved into five program areas that were the Foundation’s main priorities in the 1980s and 1990s: Justice, Children, New York Neighborhoods, Student Achievement, and Tropical Disease Research. The Foundation has completed work in these areas of long-standing concern. In each case, it adopted an exit strategy designed to build on the progress and success of individual programs and help sustain promising approaches after the Foundation’s support ended.

To find out more about the Foundation's past programs, learn about institutions that inherited the Foundation’s programs and/or continue to work in these fields, and the transition that occurred at the Foundation to adopt its current work, please see the summaries below and the supplemental pages that follow.

Transition at the Foundation: Adopting a New Grantmaking Strategy 2000-2004
The Foundation's Youth Development Fund began as a pilot in 1999 by (then EMCF President) Michael Bailin and Nancy Roob to test a new strategy of grantmaking at the Foundation.  This new strategy, rather than investing in organizations to reform large (often intractable) public systems, focused on investing in high-performing nonprofits to help them reach greater impact.  Based on the success of this pilot, the Foundation's board formally adopted its current grantmaking approach in 2000, and decided to end work in its other program areas.  This section provides reports and essays documenting the Foundation's experience and lessons learned adopting this new form of grantmaking (including Michael Bailin's essays on the subject).

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Program for Children
The Program for Children sought to advance child protection reform by emphasizing the development of partnerships among public and private agencies, organizations, and individuals in communities to share responsibility for safeguarding children.
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Program for Justice
The Program for Justice focused on improving the criminal justice system in the United States and is best known for addressing issues of sentencing, prison reform, and overcrowding.
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Program for New York Neighborhoods
The Program for New York Neighborhoods sought to improve the quality of life in Central Harlem and the South Bronx.
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Program for Student Achievement
The Program for Student Achievement promoted academic standards as a means for middle school districts to raise the achievement levels of all students.
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Program for Tropical Disease Research
The Program for Tropical Disease Research sought to eliminate the infectious disease trachoma, the leading cause of preventable blindness in the developing world.
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