Baltimore’s Promise, Fiscally Sponsored by Fund for Educational Excellence
The Summer Funding Collaborative (SFC) is an aligned fund that directs resources to high-quality summer programs for low-income children in Baltimore City. In 2021, the SFC included 13 public and private funders that, collectively, distributed $3.46 million to 87 programs, funding a projected 9,500 seats. This grant includes funding for between 5-10 non-profit organizations providing summer experiences that will be determined in late winter 2022 alongside funding for high dosage tutoring programs to provide layered support to funded summer providers.
Baltimore Tree Trust
Baltimore Tree Trust’s Community Forester Corps program offers virtual, classroom, and hand-on training in tree planting and maintenance, urban forestry, and tree mapping and data management. The program creates viable pathways to employment opportunities for people who have been marginalized by lack of education, discrimination, and unavailability of jobs matching their skill sets. By planting and maintaining trees, trainees contribute to Baltimore City’s goal of increasing tree coverage from 26% to 40% by 2037. Expanding the urban tree canopy improves the health of residents and livability of neighborhoods, promotes environmental stewardship, addresses adverse climate change and extreme heat, and advances equity.
Baltimore Kids Chess League, Inc.
Sponsored by the Abell Foundation and Baltimore City Public Schools since 2004, the Baltimore Kids Chess League (BKCL) offers an academic extracurricular program that serves more than 750 children from kindergarten to 12th grade in thirty schools. Teams practice weekly under the auspices of trained chess coaches and compete in novice, local, state, and national chess tournaments sponsored by the United States Chess Federation.
Baltimore Corps
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 local Kiva Baltimore operating partner, Baltimore Corps works with entrepreneurs, small businesses, and micro-businesses, with an intentional focus on supporting Black-owned businesses. Baltimore Corps’ Kiva Baltimore program staff assist businesses at every step of the process to apply, fundraise, and repay loans through the technology lending platform. Kiva-Baltimore supports Black-owned small-businesses and micro-enterprises operating in Baltimore City through COVID pandemic-related challenges and beyond. Grant funds will be used to support staff costs to meet expansion needs and increased demand from small and micro-business ongoing advice and consultation and provide 25 microloans through the Kiva-Baltimore platform.
Attendance Works, Fiscally Sponsored by Community Initiatives
Attendance Works will partner with the Success For All Foundation (SFA) in Baltimore City to provide an integrated attendance mentoring strategy, paired with intensive tutoring to negate learning loss and narrow equity gaps. Training for at least 22 tutors on how to effectively respond to absences and promote attendance is modeled after the Success Mentors initiative in New York that successfully yielded reduced absenteeism of nearly two weeks (nine days of school) for around 60,000 students between the years of 2010 and 2013.