What We Support

We award grants through a competitive, invitation-only process in the areas of College Readiness & Completion and Integrative Medicine.

 

College Readiness & Completion

 

The Scheidel Foundation seeks to help low-income individuals, often first-in-their-family (“first generation”), to get to and through college and be prepared to enter a career that can lead to middle-class earnings.

The Scheidel Foundation will consider support for programs that meet the following criteria:

• Serve individuals in the DC, Jacksonville, FL, or Sarasota Metro areas, or in Kauai, HI.
• Have a significant focus on helping students to access and/or complete a degree or high-quality certificate from an accredited two- or four-year college or university.
• Work with students at high school age or above (adults should have or be near completion of a high school diploma or its equivalent).
• If an established program, have some record of success. If a new program, there is evidence that shows the services provided can result in success.

 

We are particularly interested in programs that:

• Have a broad focus on their students’ post-secondary educational goals beyond a small set of college credentials or career pathways.
• Combine career planning and support so that students’ college experiences prepare them to transition into careers with (at least) middle class earnings potential.
• Provide a mix of services. Exceptions to this may be made if the service provided has a particularly catalytic effect on college readiness and/or completion.

 

We will only consider programs that regularly measure results. While organizations may track a variety of student outcomes on the path toward getting to and/or through college, we are most interested in the following:

• College enrollment
• College persistence
• College graduation
• Post-college career transition

Click here to learn more about what we seek to support for College Readiness and Completion.

 

Integrative Medicine

 

The advancement of Integrative Medicine initiatives, a practice that combines the best of western medicine and evidence-based complementary & alternative medicine and practices to achieve optimal health and healing, is a smaller, though important, area of our grantmaking. This holistic approach empowers the individual to be fully informed and active in his or her own health and healthcare options and is very effective in preventing and treating chronic conditions. It targets the root cause of an ailment that can often be alleviated by diet change, stress reduction and lifestyle changes, thus supporting the body’s natural ability to heal.

The Foundation accomplishes this by supporting programs that educate healthcare practitioners and administrators in a results-oriented manner.  We also support integrative medicine initiatives within healthcare systems. Start-up programs which prove the effectiveness of integrative medicine practices in order for the institution to incorporate the program or change existing programs are of particular interest.

 

In addition, we provide discretionary, legacy, and emergency grants.

The encouragement of personal involvement and growth among our Board members in their own areas of interest is important to us. Each Trustee or designated individual is invited to recommend their charities of choice to the other Board members. In addition, a small number of Legacy grants are made each year to organizations with ties to our late founder, Herbert Scheidel. We also provide a limited number of grants to respond to humanitarian and environmental emergencies as needed. These grant-making areas may fall outside the Foundation’s focus areas and/or geographic regions.

 

Visit our Grant Highlights page to see some of our typical grants.