2020 Grants
Grant Recipients | Amount |
|---|---|
Minneapolis, MN The All Square Fellowship, provides 12-month trauma-informed support which ensures that 14 formerly incarcerated Fellows—on a biannual basis—have the emotional support, social capital, & professional opportunities they need to become our nation’s future leaders, business owners, & legal practitioners. | $20,000 |
Minneapolis, MN An early emergency COVID-19 grant to All Square helped them retain staff who were likely to be furloughed, and who because of their engagement with corrections, might have been unable to find financial resources. | $4,200 |
Boulder, CO Attention Homes provides upstream interventions, training and supports that are equipping youth with the skills they need to end the cycle of poverty, avoid chronic adult homelessness, and work to create bright and productive futures. | $15,000 |
Minneapolis, MN Avenue partners with youth to help them achieve their dreams by providing increased mental health supports during COVID to youth who are precariously housed. | $30,000 |
Lexington, MI Camp Cavell Conservancy has committed itself to providing stewardship of the property while continuing to provide camp experiences for children and adults in the Lexington, Port Huron, Metropolitan Detroit and other communities throughout Michigan. | $3,000 |
Minneapolis, MN An emergency COVID-19 grant to support two interns in the ULead program. | $6,000 |
St. Paul, MN Elpis was trying to keep as many staff working as possible by using the PPP funds. However, the COVID pandemic completely cut their earned income businesses–the majority of their fund generation activities. This emergency grant allows them to move forward while expanding into the production of wooden adirondack chairs. | $10,000 |
St. Paul, MN Elpis Enterprises recruits local businesses to serve as Earn and Learn partner sites with a goal to offer annually at least 10 placements to trainees who have completed the social enterprise based trainings and seek additional career related experiences. | $20,000 |
Carson City, NV The healing power of companion pets is very important in the lives of many homeless persons as they find solace, protection and companionship. Feeding Pets of the Homeless brings free veterinary care, emergency services, and feeding to these companion pets. | $1,500 |
Saint Paul, MN The Genesys program provides in-demand opportunities for young adults in underserved communities as they enter professional careers through skills training, paid internships, stacked credentialing, 2 and 4 yr college, career counseling, and talent development. | $30,000 |
Goodwill/Easterseal Youthbuild St. Paul, MN The Employment Training & Education program provides short-term training in high demand sectors: Automotive, Construction, Business Services, Banking and Manufacturing (electronics soldering). Participants also receive placement/retention support & wraparound employment services. | $15,000 |
St. Paul, MN Halley Q Brown is supporting the community with the food shelf, emergency worker childcare, and services to reach out and be sure that seniors are safe. Many of these services are contractual, and the status of those contracts was unknown at the beginning of COVID. These dollars helped keep services and products moving while the contracts were negotiated. | $10,000 |
Minneapolis, MN A grant of $5,000 from Bridgewater Bank through the Sundance Family Foundation to Hennepin Technical College’s Park Center Pirates Scholarship Program provides youth recommended by their STEM teacher Tanya Drake at Park Center High School Bright Futures an on ramp to technical skills learning. | $5,000 |
Saint Paul, MN HAP’s Earn & Learn program provides low-income youth of color with employment, postsecondary training services that include community college degrees and supports from recruitment and assessment to service-learning and job placement. Youth gain confidence and skills that lead to employability in high demand industries. | $20,000 |
St. Paul, MN Keystone Community Services is keeping both their youth employed, their food shelves operational, while providing food to the hungry. By March 2020 Keystone used up $150,000 of their emergency dollars with no end in sight. Grants at the beginning of the pandemic gave Keystone the flexibility to “fill the holes”. As a result, they began making their bike shop COVID safe to earn back some of their lost earned revenue. Keystone has also been assigning youth to work in the food shelves and at food distribution events. Keystone has become a hallmark community program with summer 2020 food distribution to families in need due to COVID. | $10,000 |
St. Paul, MN This business incubator creates cohorts to support 31 startup organizations founded by women, and Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and other underestimated entrepreneurs. | $3,000 |
Lutheran Social Services FA for StreetworksMN St. Paul, MN StreetworksMN which uses Lutheran Social Services as its Fiscal Agent, is a collaboration made up of 14 youth serving agencies across the seven county metro area serving youth and young adults, ages 24 and under, who are experiencing homelessness or crisis. StreetworksMN early in the COVID crisis Streetworks staff contracted and managed a hotel in downtown St. Paul for Ramsey County youth who have found themselves with no place to go during this COVID crisis. | $10,000 |
Minneapolis, MN MentorMN creates experiences for young people by coordinating 200 mentoring programs across Minnesota by offering training support, consultation and professional networks. In this pandemic, stress and anxiety in the midst of the pandemic is affecting youth disproportionately. | $24,000 |
Minnesota Disaster Recovery Fund Minnesota Council of Foundations St. Paul, MN An early emergency COVID-19 grant to the Minnesota Council on Foundations provide funds to nonprofits providing support to people whose lives have been greatly impacted by the pandemic. The funds were distributed through a series of intermediaries, to nonprofits and then services or financial supports provided to people. The MCF fund managed by the Saint Paul and Minnesota Foundations was the first joint philanthropic efforts and resulted in $11 million being raised and disseminated to support COVID related community needs. | $10,000 |
Richfield, MN MICC is a 3-year skills and personal development post-secondary training program for young adults on the Autism spectrum and for those with other learning differences. Youth live on campus. MICC believes that everyone deserves the opportunity to discover their full potential and live a vibrant, independent life. Youth obtain internships in workplace development sites and obtain jobs and independent living post MICC. Post training supports are available to young adults after the completion of their MICC program. | $10,000 |
Native American Community Clinic Minneapolis, MN Native American Community Clinic with the unexpected Native American Encampment of Homeless people again on Hiawatha Ave, the continued work with low income patients, and the summer encampments in Minneapolis parks, has had a lot of work on their hands. Not only are many of the homeless physically or mentally ill, but they are ripe for COVID contamination. These dollars help NACC attend to short-term PPE and other costs while attending to the increased need of their patients. | $10,000 |
St. Paul, MN New Dawn Theater is committed to amplifying voices not often heard by producing plays written by women, minorities and LGBTQ communities, by highlight artists of all walks of this wonderful life, especially during COVID. | $1,500 |
St. Paul, MN Newgate School provides tuition-free auto mechanic & auto body training to lower income young adults who might not otherwise have access to formal career training. Our hands-on training in a shop environment provides both technical and professional skills needed for good paying jobs & successful long-term careers. Job placement for graduates is 100% through longstanding relationship employers. | $20,000 |
St. Paul, MN New Vision Foundation is establishing its headquarters in St Paul, MN which features a safe space for disadvantaged youth and young adults to learn coding, obtain in-demand IT certificates, digital literacy and attain middle-skill careers in technology. | $25,000 |
North Suburban Cougars Adapted Athletics Lino Lakes, MN The NSCAA Program provides young people in middle school and high school with challenging sports teams and events. These activities keep youth healthy, active and engaged with each other and form friendships and bonds for life while keeping in shape. | $3,000 |
Bloomington, MN Oasis identify strategies that connect youth who have experienced housing instability to employers where young people feel valued and and are encouraged to achieve. Oasis then helps keep them employed. Oasis continuously improves its recognized workforce innovation program that provides a greater return on investment for employers and employees. | $8,000 |
Parker Task Force for Human Services Parker, CO A COVID-19 grant dedicated to providing individuals and families in our community with food, limited financial assistance and other support services to help them become self-sufficient. | $3,000 |
St. Paul, MN Ramsey County Public Sector Leadership Academy provides 16 young adult interns with paid experiential learning experiences to increase their exposure, connections, and ultimate placement in public serve employment. Interns receive additional comprehensive supports, credentials and education. | $30,000 |
Saint Paul, MN Rebuilding Together’s Construction Workforce Training Collaborative provides a unique opportunity to deliver entry-level training in construction to underserved and minority youth, while increasing their capacity to provide repairs for low-income homeowners. | $10,000 |
Roderick Cox Fund at FilmNorth St. Paul, MN This two-pronged initiative supports both a documentary, Conducting Life about Roderick’s arduous journey from his childhood in Macon into the world of orchestral conducting, while also providing 24 music scholarships to underserved Twin Cities youth. | $1,500 |
Minneapolis, MN Sabathani Community Center: A cultural hub for the community, Sabathani closed all of its programming on March 18, 2020 with the exception of its food shelf employees and essential workers. The emergency COVID grant helped Sabathani adhere to the required protocols from the Minneapolis Health Department for all individuals using the Food Shelf including spacing, PPE, sanitation and prefilled grocery bags available for curbeside pickup. | $10,000 |
Hudson, WI The St. Croix Valley Foundation, United Way St. Croix Valley and United Way Washington County East partnered early in the pandemic to establish a COVID-19 Response Fund for the St. Croix Valley. The Fund provided support to community organizations pivoting their services in response to COVID-19 in Chisago and Washington counties (Minnesota) and Burnett, Pierce, Polk and St. Croix counties (Wisconsin). | $5,000 |
St. Paul, MN COVID impacted SPUT’s ability to run the summer programs, which hire over 80 youth and college age workers. This grant helped the program keep many of these youth employed while moving to a virtual platform. | $10,000 |
Siren, WI Softec Education leads the way in providing certified, recognized, innovative fast-track training solutions in hydraulics over a 6 weeks certification training using Simulator Virtual Reality Based Heavy Equipment. Softec has cultivated a focus with troubled youth and adults, low-income, indigenous youth, youth in recovery, and youth with closed felonies. Softec has collaborative partner employers in both WI and MN and with the Minnesota Local 49 Operators Union. | $49,100 |
Siren, WI Softec which has had outstanding results placing trainees in heavy equiment jobs in the construction industry made drastic changes in policy and procedural operations since the onset of COVID to comply with the new OSHA COVID standards. The Sundance funds allowed them to purchase communications equipment which enables the instructor to work with the students while adhering to distance learning requirements. | $5,000 |
Minneapolis, MN The SEWING 4 LIVING Project seeks to improve the well-being of young refugee/Immigrant girls and women through the sewing and cutting skills they learn to raise their ability to generate income and to become self sufficient. | $5,000 |
Minneapolis, MN Summit Academy follows a Career Matriculation Management Model (CM3) which builds fast track Career and Technical Education (CTE) trainings with paid internships for low-income people of color aged 18-26 that leads them to middle-skills careers with incomes that can support their families. Completion of a GED is built into the training program. | $35,000 |
Ubuntu Institute of Learning FA CONNECT UP Los Angeles, CA for services in Minneapolis, MN ConnectUp is a business development group providing a host of support services to Black and brown women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs from rural areas with Ubuntu Education LLC as its fiscal agent. During this COVID pandemic, ConnectUP helped dozens of business owners gain access to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) at no cost. | $10,000 |
St. Paul, MN Ujamaa Place in St. Paul, provides housing, education, job training and individual coaching to formally justice involved men in both Ramsey and Hennepin counties; many of whom grew up in and still have family in these counties. Career skills training at St. Paul College in a variety of disciplines provides a pathway to sustainable wage jobs. | $35,000 |
St. Paul, MN Ujamaa was called to host 24 new men as the result of COVID-19 and spun into action to complete the leasehold improvements, procure the safety equipment needed at a living facility on Fuller and Selby. Ujamaa then increased staff support these men needed as they started short-term certifications to gain employment. | $10,000 |
Minneapolis, MN Dougherty Family College provides a two-year college curriculum, work experience, mentoring, and social service support for students underserved by Minnesota’s education system. Through DFC’s Professional Internship Program, students gain workplace skills and job experience through paid internships. They are then prepared to successfully complete four year degree programs. | $27,000 |
St. Paul MN Urban Roots needed immediate funds to pivot their hands-on gardening work to accommodate the state Covid requirements. These included: creating online and home growing kits, buying more tools for less sharing, getting bikes and locks so that youth could travel to the gardens and sites (they could not be transported in vans), and hiring additional staff. In addition, revenue which would have been captured through CSA and farmers market sales was to be forgone, so that the produce would be available to the families of the 70 youth who were to be enrolled in the summer program through Right Track. This was a significantly large group of youth, and giving them food for their families increased the pride youth and helped with the fact that the East Side Community was facing 80% unemployment. | $10,000 |
St. Louis, MO for program in Minneapolis, MN The Green Garden Bakery Career Connects program supports the educational attainment, career skills training programs, employment opportunities, and economic mobility of the 115 young adults (18-24yrs old) in Heritage Park through community engagement, a guided curriculum, and career expectations. | $30,000 |
Minneapolis, MN The Wallin Educational Fund started a two-year scholarship program to support young people going to local community and technical colleges and provide the mentoring, guidance and group experiences that will combat isolation and build social capital for first generation students. | $36,000 |
Minneapolis, MN We Win Institute: WE WIN primarily serves youth ages 5-18 with year round programs providing academic and social advancement utilizing a multi-cultural and afro-centric approach with culturally specific curricula. | $10,000 |
YMCA of the North: Camp Widgiwagan Ely, MN Widgiwagan builds character, skills and live-long friendships while learning to conserve nature. | $1,500 |