In 2013, the Women’s Foundation of Mississippi awarded $558,236 in grants statewide across our three focus areas: access to comprehensive sex education, access to youth friendly health services, and access to opportunity.
Midtown Teen Wellness Clinic at the University of Mississippi Medical Center
Focus Area: Youth Friendly Health Services
Geographic Area: Jackson
Grant Award: $41,236
This MTWC is the first dedicated youth-friendly health clinic in the Jackson area. Although parents are welcome to accompany their teenagers, MTWC will only serve teenagers and is open from 4:30pm to 7pm, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. MTWC is a full service, nurse-run clinic associated with UNACARE and the University of Mississippi Medical Center School of Nursing.
Southern Bancorp Community Partners: Asset Builders Campaign
Focus Area: Asset Development and Financial Education
Geographic Area: Coahoma County
Grant Award: $20,000
SBCP will provide credit counseling, financial education, and other asset building services to help low-wealth individuals (primarily single working mothers) build educational, financial and material assets and create better futures for their families. Having recently established a program office in Clarksdale, SBCP will emphasize increasing program participation through outreach.
CLIMB Community Development Corporation: Workforce Training Institute
Focus Areas: Leadership Development and Job Training
Geographic Area: Gulfport
Grant Award: $20,000
In conjunction with the existing job training and personal development programs, CLIMB CDC will use an evidence-based sex education program and Health Department expertise to improve knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of at-risk women, ages 16 to 19. The program’s goals include employment, leadership, and pregnancy prevention.
Mississippi Council on Economic Education: IDA Program at Lanier High School
Focus Areas: Leadership Development and Asset Development
Geographic Area: Lanier High School (Jackson, MS)
Grant Award: $20,000
Determined Individuals Vowing to be Assets (DIVAs) is a program to provide financial literacy education, entrepreneurship skills and successful creation of individual development accounts (IDAs) for 15 young women attending Lanier High School. The funds saved in the IDAs will be matched 2:1 up to $750 and will be saved for post-secondary education expenses. For more information on MCEE, click here.
Mississippi Center for Justice: Fair Lending Campaign
Focus Areas: Asset Development and Financial Literacy
Geographic Area: Statewide
Grant Award: $20,000
The Campaign’s objective is to partner with employers and financial institutions across Mississippi to create new small dollar loan products with reasonable terms that low-wealth women can access through their jobs. This is the first initiative of its kind in Mississippi. MCJ will recruit employers to participate in an employer-based fair lending campaign in which they will be matched with banks and credit unions that create small dollar loan products for employees. Women will also have access to information about the pitfalls of payday lending and the importance of checking and savings bank accounts.
Institute of Southern Jewish Life: Talk About the Problems (T.A.P.)
Focus Areas: Leadership Development
Geographic Area: Jackson, MS
Grant Award: $20,000
T.A.P., a peer mediation program, enlists middle school student leaders to help their peers resolve conflicts peacefully. In particular, mediation is a process that is used to address conflicts involving hurtful words before they escalate. By reducing student conflicts, particularly verbal and “clique”-related conflicts among girls, T.A.P improves the school environment and positively impacts student achievement. The majority of the students participating in the project has been and will continue to be young women. Due to a Black Student Law Association mentoring partnerships, young women are also exposed to the legal field as a potential career path.
Sunflower County Freedom Project: Freedom Fellowship
Focus Areas: Leadership Development
Geographic Area: Sunflower County
Grant Award: $20,000
The purpose of the Freedom Fellowship is to work with at-risk youth over six years to ensure they receive intensive academic support and enrichment opportunities that will allow them to make smart decisions and be competitive college applicants when they graduate from high school. Fellowship program components include: core academic support, arts enrichment, health (including sex education), educational travel, and character development. One hundred percent of Fellows who complete all six years go on to enroll in a four-year college or university.
Mississippi Office of Nursing Workforce: Mississippi Delta Workforce Funding Collaborative
Focus Areas: Job Training
Geographic Area: Mississippi Delta
Grant Award: $20,000
The goal of this initiative is to develop a multi-dimensional approach to attract diverse, disadvantaged, low income women into health care careers by providing opportunities for career development that produce competent, skilled, health care workers; assist women as they transition from student to employment; and work with women as they transition into other health education programs as well as build a model reflective of the ethnicity and gender of our population. This initiative reflects the community college and sector industry commitment to a systematic approach to creating career pathways in health care for disadvantaged women. WFMS would join MHA’s existing collaborative partnership with W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Foundation for the Mid South, and various Delta-based community colleges.
Mississippi Community College Board: Two Generation Approach
Focus Area: Job Training
Geographic Area: Statewide
Grant Award: $160,000
This grant will provide tuition and wrap around support services (child care, transportation) for low-income, female students dually enrolled in Adult Basic Education/GED and Workforce, Career and Technical Education programs at the following five Mississippi community colleges: Copiah-Lincoln Community College, Meridian Community College, MS Delta Community College, Northeast MS Community College, and Pearl River Community College. Funding from the WFMS will help low-income female students matriculate into IT fields such as health information technology (HIT) and other technical fields in which females are traditionally underrepresented, and thereby enable targeted female students to earn self-sufficient wages.
Single Stop USA
Focus Area: Job Training/Wrap Around Supports
Geographic Area: Hinds Community College (Raymond and Jackson campuses)
Grant Award: $80,000
Single Stop is partnering with Hinds Community College to offer a unique “one stop” shop to help low income students stay in school. Single Stop will train Hinds Community College employees to offer benefits screening (screening students for benefits they are eligible for but not yet receiving), counseling, application assistance, legal advice, financial counseling and tax preparation. Single Stop’s unique software will determine eligibility of female students, for example, for a wide range of benefits including: food stamps, unemployment insurance, pell grants, child care, and health care. National evaluations of Single Stop indicate Single Stop clients have a 17% higher level of semester to semester persistence than a similar comparison group of students at a community college who did not receive Single Stop services.
Research: The Women’s Foundation has awarded research grants to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University. We believe that good data and evidence-based research are the cornerstones of social change.The goal of this research is to inform our grantmaking in 2014 and educate decision-makers on the experience of low income women in community college–their barriers to completion and strategies for increasing their graduation rate. This research will culminate in a policy brief written by the Women’s Foundation of Mississippi and our colleagues at IWPR (to be released in May 2014). Total research grants: $55,000
Donor Advised Fund: The Women’s Foundation awarded a $75,000 grant to Springboard To Opportunities from the Wishcamper Donor Advised Fund. Springboard To Opportunities connects families living in affordable housing with resources and programs that help them advance themselves in school, work and life. Springboard does this by working directly with families, as well as by establishing strategic partnerships with other organizations that help residents achieve their goals.
Capacity Building: Finally, we awarded two capacity building grants of $3,500 each to the Sunflower County Freedom Project and the Community Engagement Department of the Institute of Southern Jewish Life. These grants are to help build core leadership development and fundraising skills at these organizations. Total capacity building grants: $7,000