Patterson Park Audubon Center
Patterson Park Audubon Center leads hands-on activities that connect a multicultural community with nature in an urban setting. It empowers neighbors through action projects to enhance bird habitat and improve quality of life in Baltimore. Bird-Friendly Baltimore is PPAC’s effort to increase bird-friendly infrastructure in Baltimore. It will create bird-friendly buildings and community-based gardens. Up to 1 million migrating birds die each year due to collisions with buildings, especially in dense cities like Baltimore. PPAC’s bird-friendly buildings activities will include: connecting with municipal leaders to explore policy opportunities; establishing relationships with downtown building managers to reduce reflectivity of surfaces, up-lighting, and unnecessary use of lights at night, particularly during migration. PPAC will also work with partners in targeted neighborhoods to explore their interest in bird and butterfly garden development. Two community-centered, bird-friendly gardens will be designed, facilitated, and planted. This grant will support staff costs for the launch of the Bird-Friendly Baltimore initiative.
Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners
Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners is a financial empowerment and coaching provider that serves low-income workers. Its in-house team of financial coaches specializes in the challenges facing workers today: volatile income, tight cash flow, lack of emergency savings, and burdensome debt. They help clients prioritize savings, take control of their debt, and create a road map to achieving their financial goals. This grant will support staff expenses to assist up to 200 Baltimore individuals affiliated with five Baltimore-based partner organizations.
National Center on Institutions and Alternatives
In 2017, the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA) opened a vocational training center at 301 S. Center Avenue in Baltimore, providing occupational skills training in automotive repair, Commercial Driver’s License Class B, HVAC (healthing, ventilation, and air conditioning), culinary arts, and Unmanned Aerial Systems (Drones) piloting. Abell funding will support NCIA in training 267 SNAP-eligible Baltimore residents, with 200 earning industry-recognized credentials and being placed into jobs with an average starting hourly wage of $17.
Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service
MVLS’s Housing Legacy Program engages families and communities across the city to raise awareness about the importance of estate planning and provide legal assistance to families living in homes where the deed has not been properly transferred from one generation to the next. MVLS volunteer attorneys are prepared to assist families with these legal documents. Their efforts to facilitate asset transfer are particularly important to communities of color that have been historically excluded from the prospect of intergenerational wealth-building through homeownership. This grant will support staff and outreach expenses and support for a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of these legal interventions in decreasing housing distress indicators and keeping families in their homes.
Maryland Hunger Solutions
More than ten percent of Marylanders struggle with food insecurity, defined as a lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy life, and national data reveal stark racial disparities in rates of food insecurity. Maryland Hunger Solutions (MHS) works with state and local government agencies and nonprofit partners to maximize participation in federal nutrition programs, increase access to healthy, affordable food in low-income communities, and improve public policies in Maryland to reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition. This grant supports MHS’s Baltimore City SNAP outreach and enrollment campaign, which works to connect vulnerable populations with federally-funded SNAP (food stamp) benefits, a key strategy in reducing food insecurity in Maryland.