Boston Foundation announces $704,000 in quarterly grants to Greater Boston organizations

Boston – The Boston Foundation announced its quarterly discretionary grants after a meeting of the Foundation Board of Directors on Wednesday. The Board approved $704,000 in single and multi-year discretionary grants to be paid out beginning in April 2015. Of the 11 grantees for the quarter, one is receiving multi-year grant support. Education initiatives received the most grants – five of the 11 on the docket.

As part of its effort to bring about more structural reform in Boston Public Schools, the foundation awarded the Boston Compact a $75,000 one-year grant. The grant is for general operating support to the Compact, which brings together educators from district, charter and Catholic schools across Boston, to support efforts to improve education for all children and promote cross-sector collaboration in the city.

The Compact provides an infrastructure through which educators in different schools and different systems in Boston work collaboratively, compare notes, share best practices, and help one another better serve the area’s historically underserved children: English language learners, students with disabilities and Black and Latino boys.  

Preparing Students for High School and Life Beyond

In other education grants, the board also approved new funding to Citizen Schools, Inc., Boston Plan for Excellence in the Public Schools Foundation, Roxbury Latin School, and RoxMAPP.

Citizen Schools received a $50,000 one-year grant for general operating support, to continue its efforts to close the achievement gap and create a more stable path through to future success for low income students, by way of high school graduation and college admission, through Citizen Schools’ Expanded Learning Time program in Boston’s public schools.

Boston Plan for Excellence in the Public Schools Foundation was awarded $184,000 for a year of general operating support. The Plan, an organization that promotes exceptional outcomes for all students by developing great teachers and great schools through its Boston Teacher Residency program and Teaching Academies, launched the Dudley Promise Corps in 2013. The Corps, an AmeriCorps program, partners with Boston Teacher Residency to place corps members in Dudley neighborhood classrooms, as instructors, tutors, aides, and mentors.

Roxbury Latin School’s one-year, $50,000 grant will aid the school’s i2 Camp, an innovative co-ed STEM camp for middle school students. The general support grant will help the school expand its summer camp and train teachers from high-performing pilot, charter and public schools in the Greater Boston/Greater Lawrence area.

The Foundation also awarded RoxMAPP a $50,000, one-year grant for general operating support. RoxMAPP, short for Roxbury Massachusetts Academic Polytech Pathway, serves students of Madison Park High School and has a long-term goal of opening up college and technical pathways to the entire 1,100 member student body.

RoxMAPP’s goal is for every Madison Park student, upon graduation, to be ready for a full-time job or to continue studying at a four-year institution.”

Job Training with Stability in Mind

In the area of jobs and economic development, the Foundation’s board approved a $100,000 grant to support the New England Center for Arts and Technology, Inc., for one-year of general operating support. NECAT, as the center is known, is a food services industry-focused career training and education provider for adults in need of second chances.

NECAT, located in Boston’s Newmarket neighborhood, was inspired in part by the Manchester Bidwell Corporation in Pittsburgh, a career training and arts education center for adults and at risk youth, and also by expectations for the Commonwealth’s culinary arts and hospitality industries to grow by 20 percent by 2020.

English for New Bostonians, Inc. received a $100,000 one-year operating grant to expand its ESOL courses, technology for instructors and students, and resources for advocates in Boston’s ESOL education community.

English for New Bostonians is a public-private-community collaboration, whose two-fold mission is to help immigrants learn American English and integrate more smoothly into the workplace and other aspects of civic life.

Innovative Whole Health Strategies

The Reebok Foundation was approved for a multi-year discretionary grant this quarter and will be receiving $100,000 in equal annual installments of $50,000 to Fit Kidz Get Up & Go, Inc., fiscal sponsor for the Reebok Foundation’s BOKS (Build Our Kids’ Success) program.

BOKS, an innovative before-school physical activity program for elementary and middle school students in the Boston Public Schools, integrates vigorous before-school exercise with other physical activity and team building exercises throughout the school day.

The Massachusetts Public Health Association, a $50,000 one-year grant recipient, is another example of successful collaboration. The grant will provide general operating support to the Public Health Association, which is a membership organization that promotes public health policies through advocacy, education and coalition building, with a focus on continued advocacy that supports the Massachusetts Food Trust Program, increases public health funding and connects community health and clinical care.

The Massachusetts Food Trust Program, again a major beneficiary of the Public Health Association’s advocacy, provides loans, grants, and technical assistance to support new and expanded healthy food retailers and local food enterprises in low and moderate income communities.

Stronger Neighborhoods through Stable Residents

In the area of neighborhoods and housing, the Foundation’s board approved a $30,000 one-year grant for general operating support to the Coalition for Occupied Homes in Foreclosure, Inc.

The Coalition, through its local advocacy work, seeks to stabilize the Greater Four Corners neighborhood by helping residents of foreclosed occupied housing to stay in their homes. The group is also working to create a community land trust to ensure the affordability of housing units.
 
The Boston Ten Point Coalition, Inc. has been working for more than a decade to bring young adults out of gang life and into educational and work opportunities. It was credited in the late 1990s and early 2000s with helping to reduce Boston’s homicide rate to the lowest of any large city in the nation for several consecutive years. This quarter, the Coalition will receive a $50,000 one-year general operating support grant to continue those efforts and help its target clients transition out of street life.

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The Boston Foundation, Greater Boston’s community foundation, is one of the largest community foundations in the nation, with net assets of some $1 billion. In 2014, the Foundation and its donors made more than $112 million in grants to nonprofit organizations and received gifts of nearly $112 million. In celebration of its centennial in 2015, the Boston Foundation has launched the Campaign for Boston to strengthen the Permanent Fund for Boston, Greater Boston’s only endowment fund supporting organizations focused on the most pressing needs of Greater Boston.  The Foundation is proud to be a partner in philanthropy, with nearly 1,000 separate charitable funds established by donors either for the general benefit of the community or for special purposes.

The Boston Foundation also serves as a major civic leader, provider of information, convener and sponsor of special initiatives that address the region’s most serious challenges. The Philanthropic Initiative (TPI), an operating unit of the Foundation, designs and implements customized philanthropic strategies for families, foundations and corporations around the globe. For more information about the Boston Foundation and TPI, visit www.tbf.org or call 617-338-1700.