Submit Your Nominations
Nominations for the 2025 Council Awards are now open.
Submit a nomination by 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1, 2025.
The Council Awards include the Distinguished Service Award and the Scrivner Award for Creative Grantmaking. These two awards have been presented by the Council since the 1980s. The Distinguished Service Award recognizes individual leaders in philanthropy, while the Scrivner Award recognizes an exceptional grantmaking organization or group of organizations. Since 2022, we have also presented the Outstanding Corporate Philanthropy Leadership Award to recognize an individual at a corporate foundation or a corporate giving program that is advancing the greater good.
This year, we're excited to present the inaugural Building Together Award, recognizing philanthropic organizations, initiatives and/or collaboratives that invest in and/or adopt approaches that help us come together, not apart.
Nominations for the 2025 Council Awards are now open. Submit a nomination by 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1, 2025.
Please join us in Seattle, WA for Building Together from May 4-7, 2026 to recognize our award winners.
Building Together Award
The Building Together Award grew out of the Council on Foundations’ strategic focus on Building Common Ground. The award recognizes philanthropic organizations, initiatives, and/or collaboratives that invest in and/or adopt approaches that help us come together, not apart. The award:
- Celebrates work that builds the heart set, mindset, and skill set to connect and collaborate across differences. This may include efforts that foster dialogue, promote understanding, create belonging, transform conflict, and engage in collaborative problem-solving.
- Recognizes those doing the courageous and complex work of bringing people together across lines of difference. This includes creating space where diverse voices can be heard, finding shared purpose, and shaping a collective future.
Distinguished Service Award
The Distinguished Service Award, philanthropy’s highest honor, celebrates a visionary leader who inspires and embodies the qualities that define excellence in philanthropy, including commitment, courage, entrepreneurship, and impact. Previous winners have been noted philanthropic leaders who have both mobilized and unified people and institutions to produce tangible results that improve people's lives and raise the capacity of others to advance the common good.
2024 Award Winner
Darren Walker
President
Ford Foundation
Outstanding Corporate Philanthropy Leadership Award
In 2022, we launched a new award to recognize an individual at a corporate foundation or a corporate giving program who is advancing the greater good.
2024 Award Winner
Tiffany Benjamin
CEO
Humana Foundation
Scrivner Award for Creative Grantmaking
The Scrivner Award was established in 1984 in honor of the creative legacy of the late Robert Winston Scrivner, a former staff associate of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the first executive director of the Rockefeller Family Fund. Friends and colleagues of Scrivner established the award to honor outstanding creativity. It honors an innovative grantmaking organization, with a combination of vision, principle, and personal commitment, and is making a critical difference in a creative way.
Most Recent Winner
