Boston, MA
Amount granted: $25,000
Grant year: 2023
Grant category: Human Services
$25,000 to support Year Two of the Human Centered Design pilot program.
Sparkshare was created to bring together high school youth to address the problems that they choose to solve and things that mattered to them. Through the power of its Network’s convenings, connections, and learning, SparkShare youth teams share challenges and ideas, develop skills and confidence as problem-solvers, and make connections that enable them to drive positive change in their communities. Its youth teams are focused on issues such as mental wellness, substance use, economic empowerment, and racial justice.
The objective for Design Thinking is to give young people a structured system where they learn how to understand the population they are trying to impact, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create and test innovative solutions to address the problems they see in their communities. SparkShare began with the idea that by bringing people together across the boundaries that divide them, they could begin to solve society’s most intractable problems. Through Human Centered Design, the aim is to provide young people with the tool kit they need to do that.
Darien, CT
Amount granted: $35,000
Grant year: 2023
Grant category: Human Services
$35,000 to support local organizations who are addressing food insecurity issues in the region.
The Community Fund of Darien plays a significant role in addressing the health and human services needs in Darien, Norwalk and Stamford through strategic leadership and grantmaking. Its mission is to enhance the capacity of the community to care for one another by conducting a needs assessment every three years to identify community challenges, opportunities, and gaps. Funds will be used to support local organizations addressing food insecurity and food access issues.
Boston, MA
Amount granted: $35,000
Grant year: 2023
Grant categories: Human Services, Music
$35,000 to support Shelter Music Boston’s Songs of Life Program.
Shelter Music Boston presents classical chamber music concerts of the highest
artistic standards in homeless shelters and other sheltering environments. Its goal is to promote community, creative interaction, respect, and therapeutic benefit. Songs of Life: Music Shared from Shelters and Other Program includes audiences in the composition of classical music performed for them. This new music reflects the viewpoints, experiences, and life challenges faced by those who are homeless and caught in related social, economic, and health problems. The goal of Songs of Life relates directly to a core tenet of its mission: to convey the essential dignity of its audiences and encourage them to be agents of change through its work and in their own lives.
New Orleans, LA
Amount granted: $35,000
Grant year: 2023
Grant category: Human Services
$35,000 to support The National Police Accountability Project (“NPAP”) and its Heartland Police Accountability Academy.
The National Police Accountability Project is a national organization dedicated to holding police and correctional officers accountable to professional and constitutional standards. Its 550+ members litigate the thousands of cases of police and correctional officer misconduct that do not make national headlines. Its Heartland Police Accountability Academy is a year-long training and support program for attorneys in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota to build skills and confidence in bringing civil rights cases. The program will focus on providing attorneys with the nuts and bolts of civil rights litigation for cases against individual police correctional officers and their employers.
North Yarmouth, ME
Amount granted: $20,000
Grant year: 2022
Grant categories: Biodiversity, Conservation
$20,000 to support Wild Seed educational outreach programs.
Organization: The goal of Wild Seed Project is to build awareness of the vital importance of native plants and to provide people with the tools to restore biodiversity in their own communities. The project equips community members, public officials and municipalities, and land-holding individuals and organizations – from farmers to land trusts – with the skills and resources they need to collectively repopulate landscapes with native plants that expand wildlife habitat, support biodiversity, and build climate resilience.
Boston, MA
Amount granted: $20,000
Grant year: 2022
Grant category: Human Services
$20,000 to provide and expand directly needed resources to DCF and court involved children and families to meet the increase in requests for assistance.
One Can Help (OCH) was created in 2006 by juvenile court attorneys and social workers because they saw that many of the underserved children and families they worked with could not access the resources needed to address concerns or to help children thrive, and identified a solution for this system-wide problem. OCH has helped more than 13,000 children and families across Massachusetts. OCH’s mission is to provide the missing resources at-risk youth, foster children and underserved families involved in the juvenile court and child welfare systems urgently need whenever those supports are not available elsewhere.
New York, NY
Amount granted: $25,000
Grant year: 2022
Grant category: Informal Education
$25,000 to support Dancing Classrooms expansion of its Classroom Academy.
Dancing Classrooms’ (DC) mission is to cultivate essential life skills in children through the joyful art and practice of social dance. It fosters brave spaces in which children take creative and social-emotional risks while developing respect and cultural competence. Through standards-based, in-school residencies and out of school programs, DC uses the vocabulary of social and partner dance to support the next generation of compassionate global citizens.
Syracuse, NY
Amount granted: $13,202
Grant year: 2022
Grant category: Human Services
$13,202 to support the revision, expansion and production of its 80-page educational booklet Neighbor to Neighbor, Nation to Nation: Reading About the Relationship of the Onondaga Nation with Central New York, USA.
Organization: The Syracuse Peace Council is a locally based grassroots peace and social justice organization founded in 1936, which educates, agitates and organizes for social change. Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation (NOON), a project of the Syracuse Peace Council, was formed in 1999 to support the sovereignty of the Onondaga Nation (a nation in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy), their Land Rights Action and collaborate with them on environmental protection and restoration. NOON joins the Onondaga Nation’s call for justice, reconciliation and healing, through educational projects, relationship building and advocacy.
Washington, DC
Amount granted: $37,500
Grant year: 2022
Grant category: Education
$37,500 to support the research and travel expenses of 5 new scholars participating in the Global Academy.
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) represents the largest network of Middle Eastern, European, and North American scholars – across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences – specialized in the study of this region. MESA promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications, and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom. MESA has launched the MESA Global Academy, in conjunction with the SUNY Graduate Center in New York to harness the strengths of its network of institutional and individual members to sustain research collaborations and knowledge production between scholars from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and their counterparts outside the region.
Boston, MA
Amount granted: $25,000
Grant year: 2022
Grant category: Music
$25,000 to jumpstart the new community engagement initiative “Musical Sanctuary”.
Through its performing, teaching, mentoring, and scholarly activities, Emmanuel Music occupies a unique niche: a living laboratory for the music of J. S. Bach. Emmanuel Music, founded in 1970, has served as the ensemble-in-residence for Boston’s Emmanuel Church for fifty years.
“Musical Sanctuary” will feature individual musicians rehearsing Bach in a casual, drop-in setting, with the doors always open so that it is clearly perceived as informal and available to all. Volunteers will invite passersby to sit and listen, and to come and go as they wish. Listeners are also welcomed to interact with the musician—or not. This is primarily about providing a safe place for reflection, connection, and respite—through the music of J. S. Bach.
