Spotlight on The Tepper Foundation
How The Tepper Foundation Practices What It Preaches About Partnership
The Tepper Foundation was founded in 1996 by David Tepper on the belief that everyone should have equal opportunity to succeed. In 2025, the Foundation awarded more than $108 million to 185 organizations working on the frontlines of expanding opportunity across New Jersey and the United States, with a portfolio spanning food security, housing and health, community impact, crisis response, and strengthening the nonprofit sector itself.
Tepper describes their approach to philanthropy simply: it works best when done hand-in-hand with others. That's an easy thing for a foundation to say. It's a harder thing to practice.
This summer offered a clear example. For the second consecutive year, Tepper brought Nonprofit Operations 101 and 102 trainings to its grantee network, reaching both returning organizations and new ones. Grantees sent a mix of executives setting strategy and managers doing the day-to-day work of keeping programs running, spanning missions as varied as food banks, housing coalitions, refugee resettlement groups, and organizations countering antisemitism and cyber hate, from New Jersey to London. E.TBD partnered with Tepper to design and facilitate the sessions around that range.
The investment showed up in real moments. One participant spent the first session wrestling with a staffing gap he couldn't quite name, and left the second with a pitch for a new role and a draft job description. Another, working through a business process exercise built as a solo activity, realized partway through that she needed her leadership team's buy-in first, and turned an individual tool into a collaborative one.
Two-thirds of this year's Ops 102 attendees had also been at Ops 101, a sign the first session earned enough trust to bring people back. Attendees left with concrete next steps: bringing materials to their managers, using the worksheets to build leadership alignment, and in at least one case, proposing a new operations role. One put it simply: "I walked away with valuable insights and actionable ideas that I can apply within my organization."
The takeaway isn't a specific framework. It's a posture: just get started. Testing a tool, writing down a process, or being honest about which tasks don't belong on your plate anymore all count as progress, and progress compounds.
Tepper is already planning the next phase, building on this year's momentum with grantees who want to go further. What distinguishes them as a partner isn't that they fund good work. It's that they treat the organizations they fund as capable of more than the programs on their books, and they invest in getting them there.
