Baltimore Community ToolBank
$20,000 / 2020 / Community Development
Baltimore Community ToolBank lends tools and equipment to community based member organizations for a nominal fee. Items are typically used for community clean-ups, beautification, festivals, and other projects. Due to social distancing guidelines, large scale volunteer deployment projects are not being implemented, and other projects to date have been limited to 10 or less volunteers. Fees generated from tool rental orders have decreased significantly, thus decreasing the ToolBank’s revenue. During the COVID-19 crisis, tools and equipment for use in support of emergency response activities and support are being provided at no charge for the duration of the crisis. This grant will support core program staff levels which will allow program implementation without interruption of service provision.
Baltimore Corps
$125,000 / 2020 / Community Development
Baltimore Corps supports Baltimore City’s social innovation sector by recruiting and deploying mission-driven young professionals to Baltimore City’s public agencies and social sector organizations. As the need for staffing in key COVID-related positions has increased, Baltimore Corps uses its expertise to assist City agencies by conducting targeted outreach with a focus on racial equity. This grant will support staff costs associated with core programmatic efforts to recruit, deploy and retain talent in Baltimore City.
Baltimore’s Promise, Fiscally Sponsored by Fund for Educational Excellence
$75,000 / 2020 / Education
Launched by a diverse group of civic leaders in 2014, Baltimore’s Promise is a collaboration to create a cradle to career pipeline to success for youth in Baltimore City by coordinating strategy, identifying quality programs, establishing shared outcomes, building public will, and advancing good policy. In Year 6, the work will focus on the expanded implementation of the Grads2Careers occupational training scholarships for graduates from Baltimore City Public Schools, a demonstration of the new Youth Data System, a planning and implementation effort around Young Adult Literacy, a landscape analysis of out-of school programming and a continuation of the Summer Funding Collaborative. Baltimore’s Promise also is serving as the backbone for a $4.3 million fund to support food and other needs in Baltimore as a result of the COVID pandemic.
Carnegie Institution for Science
$25,000 / 2020 / Education
BioEYES is a week-long, hands-on biology unit delivered by Carnegie Institution science outreach educators and co-teaching by City Schools science teachers using live fish as subjects. The program meets the Common Core science standards, and it demonstrates—and prepares teachers for—a student-centered lab approach to science instruction. BioEYES allows Baltimore City 8th grade students and teachers access to the world of high caliber, Nobel Prize-level science. In a recent study (Shuda, Butler, Farber, and Vary, 2015), the authors found significant gains in students’ knowledge and attitudes towards science as a result of BioEYES.
It is expected that up to 2,500 8th grade students and 45 science teachers will experience BioEYES in the 2020/2021 school year via online or in person instruction with a goal to produce 8 new Master Teachers.
Drink at The Well – Hon’s Honey Social Enterprise
$40,000 / 2020 / Health and Human Services
Drink at the Well operates a drop-in center that serves vulnerable women in the Curtis Bay community in South Baltimore. The center offers case management, mentoring, financial literacy education, food, clothing and flexible financial assistance in a community that has few resources. In 2018, Drink at the Well launched a social enterprise known as Hon’s Honey, which sells locally-sourced honey and honey-based skin care products and provides employment opportunities for women in The Well’s mentoring program. This grant provides operating support for Hon’s Honey.
