HealthCare Access Maryland
$15,000 / 2020 / Health and Human Services
HealthCare Access Maryland (HCAM) is a critical healthcare non-profit that enrolls Maryland residents in health insurance and provides care coordination to special populations. Due to Covid 19, HCAM employees began working remotely in March 2020. This grant enables HCAM to purchase laptops for employees who currently are not able to telework, specifically those staff members who verify Medical Assistance applications for eligibility and provide health care coordination for children placed in foster care.
Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) for Children in Baltimore, Inc.
$29,000 / 2020 / Health and Human Services
Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Baltimore provides support and advocacy for children in abuse and neglect cases in Baltimore City’s Juvenile Court. CASA recruits and trains lay volunteers who work closely with children referred by the Juvenile Court to assess their needs and make recommendations to the Court regarding the child’s placement and needed services. Research on the CASA model suggests that children with CASA volunteers are more likely to be placed in permanent homes and less likely to re-enter foster care after they achieve permanancy than children without CASA volunteers. This grant supports a new volunteer recruitment campaign, with a particular focus on increasing the number of African American CASA volunteers.
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.
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.
The Literacy Lab
$75,000 / 2019 / Education
A replication of the acclaimed Minnesota Reading Corps, Literacy Lab embeds rigorously trained reading tutors in PreK classrooms and provides 1:1 tutoring in schools to children in Kindergarten through third grade. In 2019/20, Literacy Lab nearly doubled in size with 65 tutors serving an anticipated 1,155 children in 24 Baltimore City elementary schools. Literacy Lab tutoring participants are between 1.5 to 5 times as likely to be on grade level than students who started at the same grade level and received no tutoring. In addition, Literacy Lab’s Leading Men program annually employs and trains five recent graduates of color in Pre K classrtooms, preparing them to enter a career in education.
