Grant total recently tops $120,767 mark

The Hot Springs Area Community Foundation and Youth Advisory

Council recently awarded annual grants totaling over $120,767. The grantees were invited to a reception in their honor. Members of our board of directors and the youth advisory council, along with their advisers, had a heartwarming experience hearing the nonprofits share their mission. Each one reaches out to provide services that improve the quality of lives of their clients in our community.

The foundation accepted applications focusing on various fields of interest including education, human services, economic development and job training, health and the arts. Fifty- three applications totaling over $318,000 were received by a combined effort this year with our board advised Giving Tree grant program and our Youth Advisory Council (YAC) group. Combining our efforts proved to beneficial to both groups, allowing both groups to be able to be involved in the grantmaking process and be exposed to a broader spectrum of the need for assistance in our community. From the total applications received thirty-five were selected to receive funding for outstanding and worthwhile projects.

Included in the thirty-five were two grants large grants made for Grade-Level Reading programs which will be facilitated this summer by the Fountain Lake Elementary School and the local YMCA. These programs place a special emphasis on early literacy and grade-level reading. Unfortunately, only 37 percent of Arkansas third-graders achieved “proficient” reading scores on the ACT Aspire standardized test during the 2016-17 school year. Third-grade reading levels are a critical predictor of later success in school and the workforce. Fountain Lake will host a summer learning loss prevention program for their third-graders and the YMCA will continue to facilitate their summer achievement and loss prevention programs in the Hot Springs School District. These programs will hopefully serve to become models for other programs to be offered in the future in a larger countywide effort.

We congratulate those receiving grants from our unrestricted Giving Tree Endowment, the John and Jane Asimos Endowment, the Frances Vaught Endowment and other anonymous fund holder endowments which are all directed by our board. We regret we could not fully fund all the requests, and because of limited resources, many requests were not granted. We, too, are dependent on the generosity of contributors to increase our grantmaking efforts. Both of our grantmaking groups studied the needs in our area and worked hard to fulfill them with the resources we have.

Contributions to our grantmaking efforts will always be used to funding worthy projects through our local nonprofit agencies. No money meant for charity is used to meet our modest budget. Gifts of any size are welcome and may be sent to HSACF, P.O. Box 56, Hot Springs, AR 71902.

We invite you to visit our Web pages at www.arcf.org under local offices or check us out on Facebook.