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- Frequent moves are the most significant barrier to academic success, as they disrupt both students and teachers. Students on the move need extra time and attention to get caught up, requiring teachers to spend more time with those students.
- Students who are unable to find stable shelter have difficulty meeting state or district mandates regarding the number of days they must attend school to stay enrolled.
- Often, the slow transfer of student records, along with differing course requirements from school to school, complicates the accrual of sufficient credits for homeless students to be promoted and receive a high school diploma.
A new nonpartisan resource, Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy, provides data about foundations and their democracy-related grantmaking in a structured, contextualized, and visual format. Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy was created through a partnership of eight funders in the field, including the Rita Allen Foundation, and is being developed by the Foundation Center.
The tool allows funders, nonprofits and other interested parties to sift through data on the $1.7 billion (and counting) granted by foundations to strengthen civic engagement in the United States since 2011. For the first time, we have an open tool for visualizing who gave how much to whom for what. While the tool and the data will continue to develop, it already gives a tremendously useful view of opportunities for greater partnerships and knowledge in the field—both for funders and for the organizations, small and large, established and emerging, working to strengthen our democracy. As Kelly Born of the Hewlett Foundation, another of the project partners, writes in a post introducing the tool: “As useful as this data set and visualization will be for foundations already working in the field or new funders considering entering it, the real killer app for this work will be to help grant seekers.”
The New Jersey Arts and Culture Renewal Fund has awarded nearly $600,000 in grants to nonprofits that will use the funds to help artists, teaching artists and history professionals recover from the financial devastation of the pandemic.
The grants, the third round of funding awarded by NJACRF, brings the grant total to more than $4.5 million in support to 172 nonprofits in the arts and culture sector. The fund, founded in 2020 as a way to help the arts during the pandemic, is hosted by the Princeton Area Community Foundation.
Jeremy Grunin, co-chair of the NJACRF and president of the Grunin Foundation, said the grants correspond to a name for the organization – which now views itself as a vehicle for renewal.
“Recovery to renewal signifies a shift from crisis support to an opportunity to change the actual system itself,” he said. “We always knew that smaller nonprofits most vulnerable to disruptions and those historically underfunded prior to the pandemic were going to need longer-term support.
“The New Jersey Arts and Culture Renewal Fund will create an additional resource of fast and flexible funding that wasn’t previously available – helping to build a much stronger arts, cultural, and historical ecosystem in New Jersey.”
The grants announced today total $592,501 and will be awarded to nonprofits that will act as intermediaries, re-granting the funds to artists, teaching artists, and history professionals.
Eastside High School in Paterson sits in the middle of a struggling neighborhood, in a city where 25% of the residents are living below the poverty line, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
Paterson’s poverty rate is more than twice the state average of 10%, which makes the school, built in 1926, a refuge — and now a resource.
On Thursday, Montclair State University president Jonathan Koppell came to Eastside with a $1 million grant and a vision: to make the school into a community hub, offering free meals, health care, and mental health counseling, not just to the 2,000 students, but to their families as well.
The initiative is called One Square Mile, and it is being seeded with a $1 million grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. The program was developed by Koppell during his tenure as Dean of the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University, which worked with the Phoenix-area community of Maryvale to address poverty.