NPower, Inc.
In 2016, with support from the Abell Foundation and others, NPower replicated its IT training program for low-income young adults in Baltimore. NPower’s core training program provides students with 16 weeks of hands-on classroom instruction in hardware and software. The academic portion focuses on teaching fundamental IT skills, including networking, cloud computing, coding and service management. Following the classroom instruction, students earn their CompTIA certification and have the option to take additional certificate exams. NPower participants then enter a seven-week paid internship at a local employer, working four days per week, while one day is spent in professional development activities in the classroom. In the coming year, NPower plans to enroll 200 low-income young adults into training, graduating 160 and placing 136 into employment.
Art with a Heart
Each year, 70 Art with a Heart teachers and assistants provide 14,500 engaging, educational, and interactive visual arts classes to vulnerable Baltimore children, youth, and adults in schools, group homes, shelters, community centers, recreation centers, senior facilities, and hospitals. Funding from the Abell Foundaiton will support HeARTworks, a workforce development program that uses art as a vehicle to teach job skills; HeARTwares, Art with a Heart’s social enterprise/retail store that sells HeARTworks participants’ artwork; and arts integration, Art with a Heart’s engaging visual arts programs that supplement academic curricula in 19 Baltimore elementary/middle schools.
CASH Campaign of Maryland
The Baltimore CASH Campaign—Creating Assets, Savings, and Hope—was launched in 2001 to increase access to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a powerful work incentive and poverty-alleviation tool, lifting more families out of poverty than any other federal aid program. Now a program of the CASH Campaign of Maryland, Baltimore CASH plans to serve 10,000 Baltimore residents by operating 15 to 20 free tax preparation sites, continuing its efforts to build high volume sites that can provide quality tax preparation, and asset development services.
Citywide Youth Development / Center for Urban Families, Inc.
Citywide Youth Development is a nonprofit organization that teaches young people in Baltimore entrepreneurial skills. With funding from the Abell Foundation, Citywide Youth Development will renovate a 10,000 square foot building on North Avenue to establish the EMAGE (Entrepreneurs Making and Growing Enterprises) Center. The goal of the Center is to use entrepreneurship and manufacturing as a crime prevention, poverty eradication, and community revitalization strategy. The Center for Urban Families serves as the fiscal agent for the grant.
Civic Works, Inc.
The Center for Sustainable Careers (CSC) has built a multi-tiered green career “pathway out of poverty” by training and placing Baltimore City residents in the brownfields remediation and residential energy-efficiency industries. Across its programs, CSC has maintained an average job placement rate of 93%. Since 2014, 81% of graduates have remained employed for at least one year. Among the 125 participants served in the past year, most had a significant history of arrest and conviction and most were formerly incarcerated. Over the next year, with funding from the Abell Foundation, CSC will train 135 Baltimore City residents for entry-level positions as well as 24 incumbent workers.