USA TODAY Network’s program helps nonprofits
A Community Thrives initiative supports 16 organizations nationwide.
Nonprofit groups across the country will benefit from more than $4.5 million in funds this year as a result of the Gannett Foundation’s “A Community Thrives” grant program, the foundation announced Tuesday.
The grant program, part of the USA TODAY Network, is in its third year.
Since it was created in 2017, A Community Thrives has contributed more than $6.5 million to community initiatives across the USA to help promote positive change.
This year, A Community Thrives is awarding more than $2 million in grants: $1 million in national project grants and more than $1 million in operating grants.
Girls Write Nashville, co-founded in 2017 by Georgia English, was a recipient of a national project grant.
“Being such a young organization that has really been funded on T-shirt sales and blood, sweat and tears, it’s ... just completely life-changing,” English said. “I’m still processing it, honestly.”
There were more than 1,500 submissions from 46 states to this year’s program.
The program’s applicants raised more than $2.5 million through a GoFundMe platform called CrowdRise that helps nonprofit groups raise money. Combined with the funds awarded by the Gannett Foundation as grants, more than $4.5 million will be distributed as a result of A Community Thrives, said Sue Madden, director of the Gannett Foundation.
The Foundation awarded a number of different grants – some as large as $100,000 – for community-changing ideas that can be turned into a reality. This year, there were more than 100 grants awarded. Sixteen nonprofits received the highest award of being designated a national project grant recipient.
The Gannett Foundation selected recipients to receive the national grants below based on the proposed projects’ viability, sustainability, community need and community building properties.
Why raise money for communities?
Journalists in the USA TODAY Network are telling local stories and regularly hear amazing ideas to improve American communities – which helped to inspire the creation of A Community Thrives.
The Low Income Housing Institute was among the 2019 recipients.
The Seattle-based organization was awarded a $100,000 national project grant for its efforts to help improve their community through housing.
The Low Income Housing Institute builds, owns, and runs housing for the homeless and formerly homeless people throughout Washington state. It provides supportive services to help its clients increase self-sufficiency and transition to permanent housing.
The Low Income Housing Institute developed what they call 10 “tiny house villages” in Seattle, and one in Olympia.
“You can help end homelessness for hundreds of thousands of people, it’s by no means a totally helpless situation,” said Sharon Lee, executive director. “An ordinary person who cares about ending homelessness can pick up a paint brush and help us literally end homelessness.”
The institute, which has already built 300 tiny houses, has a goal of building 500 homes for those in need.
Girls Write Nashville, which uses songwriting and mentorship to empower young female voices, received a national project grant for $50,000 to expand programs for girls without access to this type of extended learning time opportunity. English, who co-founded the group with her now co-CEO Jen Starsinic, was driving when she found out the group was being awarded the grant money.
“I just about had to pull over,” she said. With the grant, English said, they will be able to fund their 2020 Expansion Project, serving triple the number of girls they had been able to help previously.
Tim Gilman-Ševcí̌ k, executive director of the RETI Center in Brooklyn, New York, was taken by surprise when he found out that his organization received a $100,000 grant from A Community Thrives.
The RETI Center, in the Red Hook neighborhood, will be using the funding to continue work on their Blue City Lab project: a floating, sustainable, off-thegrid neighborhood which is a resilience effort started after Hurricane Sandy battered the community in 2012.
“It will allow us to put the first physical structures into the water and start testing the systems that will let us work off-grid, start training local low-income populations in green collar jobs, and improve the water quality and biodiversity of this polluted industrial area,” Gilman-Ševcí̌ k said.
Other winners
❚ R.E.A.D., or Read Early And Daily, which received a grant of $50,000 will launch its Book Bus project. R.E.A.D. will begin a mobile book “store” of culturally relevant books in book deserts for the low-income community and host community building events. R.E.A.D. is based in Arlington, Virginia.
❚ The Young Writers Project, based in Burlington, Vermont, will use its grant of $25,000 to help fund The Community Journalism Project. The project will immerse middle and high school students (ages 13-19) in journalism. The students will have the opportunity to research, interview, write and edit communitybased stories and have the opportunity to be published in media outlets including the Burlington Free Press, one of USA TODAY Network’s more than 100 publications.
Upward Intuition in Pensacola, Florida, Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation in Cincinnati, Fork Real Community Café in Rapid City, South Dakota, are among recipients of grants in past years.