Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland, Inc.
$72,000 / 2020 / Community Development
Pro Bono Resource Center provides legal assistance, recourse information and education to Baltimore City homeowners at risk of foreclosure to delinquent real property taxes or water bills. The Tax Sale Prevention Project includes training and engaging volunteer attorneys and housing counselors to assist Baltimore residents at risk of tax sale; citywide tax sale prevention clinics; presentations at community educational events; promotion of the TaxSaleHelpBaltimore.com online tool and targeted outreach via postcard. This grant provided support for staff and project expenses associated with the Tax Sale Prevention Project.
PIVOT, Inc.
$75,000 / 2020 / Workforce Development
PIVOT was founded in October 2017 in response to the dramatic gap in services geared towards women in reentry in Baltimore City and the lack of coordinated services specifically targeting workforce development for women. The PIVOT model was designed to establish cooperative relationships between service providers in workforce development, public health, substance abuse treatment and mental health, human services and other supportive services such as legal aid, transportation, clothing, housing, childcare, family reunification, financial education and more. Funding from the Abell Foundation will support 45 women being served by Pivot during the grant period.
Parks & People Foundation
$35,000 / 2020 / Community Development
Parks & People Foundation offers a paid youth internship and environmental education after school and summer Youthworks program called ‘Branches’ to address two critical issues: the need for meaningful employment for economically disadvantaged youth and the need for a trained workforce caring for parks and green spaces in the City. Participants in the Branches program gain hands-on experience and skills designing and implementing projects that have a community impact while contributing to the areas where many of them live and attend school, including neighborhoods which have high levels of poverty and few opportunities for positive development of young people.
Office of the Public Defender
$125,000 / 2020 / Criminal Justice and Addiction
The Digital Forensics Lab will serve OPD clients who may have exonerating evidence or other valuable data on their mobile devices or social media accounts that are not available to or disclosed by the prosecution. In addition to potentially reducing outside expert fees for digital forensics analysis and testimony, this project will allow for an increasingly important avenue of investigations that is currently untapped. With support from the Abell Foundation, OPD can obtain the equipment, software, and training needed to conduct in-house data digital investigations, including: cell phone data extraction; internet, social media and cloud-based tracking and analysis; and mapping of digital data.
Neighbor to Family, Inc.
$10,000 / 2020 / Health and Human Services
Neighbor To Family (NTF) provides high quality foster care to sibling groups so that siblings do not have to be separated when they are removed from their homes. NTF uses trained, professional foster families to provide temporary homes for sibling groups, while working closely with the biological family to address the issues that led to the children being removed from their home. The average NTF foster family takes in four siblings, with some taking in up to eight siblings at a time. This grant funds extracurricular, recreational and educational activities for children in NTF’s Baltimore program.
