Fulfilling our mission to create lasting impact
At the Wean Foundation, we believe impact must be measured. To make our vision real, we challenge ourselves to measure effectiveness and growth through a lens of racial equity.
As we partner with residents and organizations, we support ongoing, equitable access to resources, knowledge and opportunity, especially in communities of color. We have created a culture rooted in learning that values the voices of residents. Their experiences inform strategies that drive towards the solutions most important to them: Upward economic mobility, education and career opportunity and improved physical landscape.
2023 Impact Report
Empowered residents creating an equitable Mahoning Valley
In 2019, The Raymond John Wean Foundation adopted a five-year strategic direction that made race equity and inclusion central to all aspects of its work and the bar by which it committed to measuring success. Since then, the Wean Foundation has taken thoughtful steps to ensure its work effectively advances its vision of empowered residents creating a more equitable Mahoning Valley. The 2023 Impact Report highlights progress over the last five years.
Our 2023 Impact Report highlights our grantmaking and capacity-building efforts over a five-year period, the duration of our most recent strategic phase. Numbers below represent totals for 2019-2023, unless otherwise noted.
Total Grantmaking
$13,285,791
Percent of Community Investment grant dollars to Black, Hispanic or Latinx-led organizations in 2023
30%
Total Community Investment grant dollars to Black, Hispanic or Latinx-led organizations in 2023
$905,400
Five organizations
Total Community Investment grant dollars to Black, Hispanic or Latinx-led organizations in 2022
$552,500
Four organizations
Foundation-sponsored REI Workshop participants*
878
*since 2017
Capacity-building Workshop participants
189
The Vanguard of the Valley
They are sowing community gardens, empowering women, creating education opportunities for youth, connecting formerly incarcerated individuals to jobs, supporting the growth of small businesses, serving in government, running nonprofits, organizing neighborhoods, bringing commercial development to forgotten places, and promoting the imperative of racial equity. The Vanguard of the Valley are fighting for a better community day in and day out because the Mahoning Valley is their home. Our home.
Over the course of 2024 and 2025, we are sharing stories that demonstrate the good work of our region’s vanguard. The Wean Foundation is grateful to call these individuals and organizations partners in our work toward a shared vision of a healthy, vibrant, equitable and economically stable Mahoning Valley.
Meet The Vanguard of the Valley. These are their stories.
Making Philanthropy Better
Making Philanthropy Better, is a special report that captures our work over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic—both what we did to support the community during this tumultuous and uncertain time and how.
Specifically, the report highlights the ways we’ve strived to become more collaborative, resident-centered and racially equitable and calls on leaders to build on four key practices: a deeper commitment to racial equity; more intentional community engagement; courageous experimentation and learning; and sustained collaboration.
Download a copy of the report here.
case study
Neighborhood SUCCESS: Celebrating a decade of transformation
In 2008, the Foundation created the Neighborhood SUCCESS grant program to amplify the efforts of grassroots organizations working to address challenges in their communities. And for over a decade, the program fulfilled its purpose and the Foundation’s mission, shifting power to residents and their neighborhoods, serving as a reminder that true, lasting change comes from the Valley’s most valuable asset—its residents.
Through Neighborhood SUCCESS, the Foundation expanded meaningful resident participation and leadership; encouraged communication and collaboration among residents and organizations; leveraged financial, human and material resources in the community; and enhanced neighborhoods, physically, socially and economically. More than 250 unique grassroots organizations received over $1.9 million in funding.
In 2018, the Foundation released SUCCESS: A Decade of Transformation, a commemorative book dedicated to the hundreds of residents and dozens of committee and Resident Council members and staff who launched and nurtured the program and made it a success.
Applying lessons it learned over the life of the program, the Foundation made adjustments in 2023 to how it supports grassroots organizations to ensure its long-standing dedication to neighborhood success is embedded in all it does. Grants to grassroots organizations and groups are now known as Resident Engagement Grants.
SUCCESS: A Decade of Transformation
We believe in the Mahoning Valley and in its future, because we believe in the people that call these neighborhoods “home.” They are robust, resourceful and hard-working; this book is dedicated to the celebration and honoring of them.
2019 Community Survey
To implement its newly adopted Strategic Direction 2019-2023, in September of 2019 the Foundation conducted a community survey to learn from residents and grantees what they were experiencing as the most pressing challenges and opportunities in their neighborhoods.
The 150 stakeholders who participated provided valuable feedback and insight that continues to inform the Foundation’s grantmaking, capacity building, convening and partnership strategies.
Partnering for change
Authentic change begins with residents — those closest to the challenges imposed by systemic racism and entrenched systems of advantage. Informed by their rich experiences, we partner to establish measurable goals, data-driven objectives and indicators to evaluate our progress. We seek to create a learning, collaborative culture to accelerate and sustain lasting change to fulfill our mission.
Wean Park – Where Community Happens
Wean Park is a 20-acre community complex of recreational green space and walking paths that serves as the front door to the City of Youngstown. Located at 229 E. Front Street, near the city’s downtown, it is a continuation of the Foundation’s long-followed practice of supporting initiatives that strengthen community through engaging residents. Families picnic on plush, grassy knolls; atttend summer concerts; enjoy art and culture festivals; and jog or walk the well-appointed trails that encompass the park.
Grantmaking
Funding the development and implementation of viable solutions led by organizations whose leadership reflects the racial demographics of the communities in which they work.
Capacity Building
Supporting the strong leadership, strategy and impact of Black and Hispanic/Latinx-led organizations.
Convening and Partnerships
Defining challenges, formulating solutions and taking collective action, with Black and Hispanic/Latinx-led organizations who have a stake in the decisions being made.