WYPR – Your Public Radio Corporation
Baltimore and Maryland face critically important and increasingly difficult environmental issues and public health challenges while news organization coverage has shrunk dramatically over the last decade. WYPR, Baltimore’s local radio station, offers “The Environment in Focus,” a weekly program providing listeners with engaging and informative stories about the environment and environmental issues from air pollution, sea level rise, and endangered species to relevant federal rulings, state policy analysis and city actions. This grant pays the full production costs of the weekly radio program.
Up2Us Sports
Up2Us Sports was founded in 2010 as a national non-profit with the goal to use the power of sport to fight childhood obesity, end academic failure, and reduce youth violence by empowering youth with the skills they need to make good choices and to be physically active. In 2018, Up2Us opened a chapter in Baltimore to provide 200-trained coaches over the next five years – 40 per year – to community organizations throughout the city, with a focus on South and West Baltimore, for at least a one-year period. This grant helped to partially subsidize the expenses incurred by community programs with limited resources.
Transit Choices
Transit Choices is a coalition of business organizations, universities, cultural institutions, community groups, planners, developers and entrepreneurs concerned with creating an efficient and effective public transit system in Baltimore. Transit Choices engages the coalition to develop priorities for investment and to advocate for improvements that increase options for work and school commutes for the 35 percent of Baltimore residents without cars and address transit mobility as a competitiveness issue for the city. This grant provides operating support.
St. Francis Neighborhood Center
The St. Francis Neighborhood Center has served the Reservoir Hill neighborhood in many ways since 1963, including by offering after-school programming where students engage in tutoring and homework assistance along with arts, music, and performance activities. This grant supported the organization in the renovation and expansion of their 125-year-old three-story townhome at 2405 Linden Avenue. The new 12,000 sq. ft. facility will include five classrooms, a study hall and library, a café and kitchen, two meeting rooms, a multi-purpose room, an art studio, and an expanded computer lab.
St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center
The St. Ambrose host home program matches homeless young adults, ages 18-24, with homeowners who have been recruited and trained to work with this population, who provide temporary homes for the youth until they find permanent housing. The program is designed to be a short-term stay, with a goal of transitioning the youth to permanent housing within five months. This grant provides operating support for the host home program, which expects to house 25 homeless youth over the coming year.