News from the Kenneth King Foundation
Thank you for reading our quarterly newsletter. We are grateful for our strong, knowledgeable, and resourceful community of funders, grant and program related investment partners. Thank you for your ideas, innovation, and spirit of collaboration. As Colorado experiences the after effects of the last eighteen months, we at the Foundation continue to focus on how recent events impact our community’s most vulnerable and their ability to create, maintain and sustain pathways to employment or entrepreneurship. Much work remains to help address the inequities too many Coloradoans face. Brighter each day, as infection rates decline, and the economy recovers, we look forward to days ahead. Just recently, the Foundation approved grants totaling $1,283,750 and $500,000 in program-related investments. Look for more information about our most recent awards in our giving history database.
Latest Program-Related Investment
Urban Land Conservancy (ULC), Denver Public Schools (DPS), and Denver Housing Authority (DHA) recently announced they have purchased the former Johnson & Wales University Denver campus. Kenneth King Foundation provided a program-related investment to Urban Land Conservancy towards the operation of the Kitchen Network. The Kitchen Network is Denver's longest-running shared kitchen, which incubates specialty food businesses. With this investment, they can expand to the Culinary Arts Building and Vail Hall on the campus allowing the organization to double its impact and number of small businesses served. This is a major feat for our community, to protect this area from development and secure part of it for low-income individuals seeking affordable housing options closer to downtown.
Theory of Change
The Kenneth King Foundation has refined its Theory of Change to better define our purpose through a cause-and-effect logic statement, providing a high-level view of our desired results, beyond our typical answer: jobs. Our Theory of Change outlines our strategy and assumptions that ground our mission, vision and funding interests. Our three main funding areas, Entrepreneurship, Employment and Removing Barriers to Employment, are defined with short- and long-term outcomes with related activities, processes, theoretical assumptions and principles. We believe this framework will provide additional information for organizations to determine mission alignment in seeking grants and Program-Related Investments. We also took a hard look at metrics and how they align with the multitude of measurement guidelines in this industry.
Click on the link below to read more about our theory of change and logic model.
