Sherwood Foundation

**About Us** **Mission:** The Sherwood Foundation® promotes equity through social justice initiatives enhancing the quality of life in Nebraska. **Vision:** We believe social justice is the proactive reinforcement of policies, practices, attitudes, and actions that all produce equitable power, access, opportunities, treatment, impacts, and outcomes for all. **Who We Fund:** The Sherwood Foundation® limits grants to organizations that are tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3), government entities, schools, or churches that are serving Nebraska. These organizations must be in good standing with the Internal Revenue Service. **What the Sherwood Foundation Values** The Sherwood Foundation has strongly held values regarding civil liberties, equality and fairness with a particular focus on women and people oppressed because of their race, sexual orientation, and/or religion or lack-thereof. **Equal rights.** We believe all humans are created equal. We work to eliminate government and social barriers to equality. **Access to civic life.** We are proud to live in a democracy and believe that the rights provided to individuals in the United States should be protected and the best way to protect those rights is to ensure equal access to the voting polls. **Reproductive justice.** We support a woman’s right to self-determination about reproductive health choices. We expect our grantees serving women and girls to ensure access and education to all health care options, including abortion. **Opportunity to thrive.** We believe a zip code should not determine the outcome of a life. We see how government institutions and laws have historically and do presently oppress and suppress opportunity, particularly for people of color but also other minority populations and women. We work with our community to undo systemic oppression and build systems that meet the needs of citizens and do not further oppress. We seek economic justice for our neighbors and the opportunity that lies therein. **Access to services.** We expect grantees to ensure that clients have access to services and that service providers work to remove barriers rather than create barriers to care and compassion. A service provider’s religious belief system should not be imposed upon those who seek their services, whether through proselytization, coercion, guilt, or an unspoken quid-pro-quo expectation to participate in faith-based classes or religious services. We respect that not all nonprofit organizations share the same values as the Foundation. We don’t ask nonprofits to change values for us or for funding. We do ask that nonprofits leaders respect our values and save everyone time and energy by not seeking funding if our organizational values aren’t aligned.