GRANTS AWARDED
2017: $25,000 to The Women’s Initiative
Ingrid Ramos, LPC, Bienestar & Resilience Programs Director
The Women’s Initiative (TWI) is using their $25,000 Women United grant for the operation of critical mental health services to 3,200 women through its core programming. Women served come from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds; many have been the victims of abuse, suffer from trauma, and face a variety of challenges such as the death of a family member, divorce, poverty, and post-traumatic stress disorder. TWI offers mental health counseling, social support, education and outreach to those needing help coping with depression, anxiety and trauma through individual and group therapies.
2017: $10,000 to Georgia’s Healing House
Georgia’s Healing House (GHH), a program of Georgia’s Friends, serves women during their initial stages of recovery from alcohol and drug dependency by providing a safe place to live, an individualized treatment plan, individual mentorship, and support as women reenter the workplace. In the first two years, 42 women resided at GHH, all of whom remained free of drugs and alcohol during their stay. Seventeen successfully completed the program and 12 are still receiving care. There is no other supervised supportive residential program in the Charlottesville area for women in early recovery from addiction. The Women United award supports the operation of the house.
2016: $20,000 to Piedmont Housing Alliance
Nutrition and Community at Friendship Court: Friendship Court, an affordable housing community of 150 very low income households, is managed by Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA), which offers an after school program, complete with snacks, for children who are residents. The previous source of the snacks is no longer able to provide the food. Our Women United grant will bridge funding of $20,000 for a year while they complete the process of qualifying for a USDA program that would supply snacks. PHA will provide 30-40 children with healthy, locally sourced snacks five days a week for the ten months that school is in session. The grant money will pay for both the food and three hours of staff time per week to obtain and serve the food.
The group of approximately 100 children who will benefit from the grant are aged 3 to 18 years old, 93% of whom live in female-headed households, and have a median family income of $11,000 per year. The residents are predominately African American.
2016: $20,000 to AHIP Children Safe at Home
Children Safe at Home is a household repair program through Albemarle Housing Improvement Program that responds when there is an urgent call from homeowners for critical repairs to ensure that their children have safe and secure homes. Women United’s $20,000 grant will be used to make 30 critical home repairs for low-income families in 2017. Funds will be used for project planning and estimating, labor, building materials and supplies.
The target population to benefit from this grant is low income, home-owning families with children under 18 years of age in the Charlottesville and Albemarle area. In the past year, the population served by this program was 60% African American or Hispanic, with 23% of the families being headed by a single parent; the average annual income in these households was $30,049.
Please visit http://www.ahipva.org/ for more information.
2015: $25,000 to Foothills CAC
Foothills Child Advocacy Center provides a coordinated system of effective response and intervention to children who have been victimized. Their goals are to minimize trauma, promote healing, and ensure child safety. Women United’s $25,000 grant will provide training for professionals who serve child abuse victims and their families so that they can continue to provide a coordinated, evidence-based, culturally competent, and compassionate response that helps reduce trauma for these children, ensure their healing, and keep them safe. These trainings will address two new and significant challenges in child abuse intervention: (1) identifying and providing an appropriate response to victims of human trafficking under the age of 18 in the Charlottesville/Albemarle area and (2) improving medical care of child abuse victims in the community.