Each year, a group of Millennium Trust donors serves as an advisory committee to help focus priorities for the year and make grant recommendations to The Community Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
Following are this year’s four grantees and their project descriptions:
Attention Homes: Social Enterprise for Homeless Youth
Attention Homes is developing a social enterprise for youth as part of its Runaway and Homeless Youth (RHY) program. Goals for the social enterprise include teaching responsibility and how to manage personal finances, and nurturing a sense of empowerment toward sustainable careers and self-sufficiency. Millennium Trust funding is being used to research what type of business would be effective, as well as to conduct an assessment of Attention Homes’ assets, to pave the way for implementing a successful social enterprise that underscores the work already underway to support homeless youth in Boulder.
Boulder County Farmers Markets (in partnership with Ed & Ruth Lehman YMCA): Bridging the Food Gap
Affordability of – and access to – locally-grown food is hard to find in a food desert…even harder when you don’t have transportation. Pop Up Produce (PUP) brings produce to areas that need it most…while supporting local farmers. This effort ensures produce pick-up and transport to low-income, low-access areas (including Longmont), sold at minimal markup. The pilot consists of a 10-week effort during the peak of Colorado’s produce season: farmers are paid a fair price to secure their livelihood, and a bilingual staff member will organize the pick-up, transport and sale.
“I Have a Dream” Foundation of Boulder County: Every Child Deserves to be a Dreamer
“I Have a Dream” Foundation of Boulder County hopes to eventually serve all 2,000 youth living in Boulder Housing Partners (BHP) low-income housing, and who attend the main “feeder” elementary schools (Columbine and University Hill), by scaling up its programming to high-risk youth. “I Have a Dream’s” new classes include integrated services with community stakeholders, including BHP, the Boulder Valley School District, the City of Boulder and others in a “Dream Big” initiative. This April, “I Have a Dream” launched a Dreamer class of 80 2nd-graders, a pilot program for this emerging collaboration.
Motus Theater: Creative Community Conversation on Experiences of Immigration, A One-Action Project
“Creative Community Conversation on Experiences of Immigration” is a year-long, county-wide One Action project the leverages the arts to foster conversation on immigration and create a more inclusive community. Cultural, immigrant, education organizations and artists will draw on their expertise to collaborate on a range of exhibitions, performances, films and readings to stimulate dialogue on historic and contemporary immigration issues. Through this project, stories of immigrants and our immigrant past will become visible; stronger relationships will be formed between arts, educational and immigrant organizations, and bridges built between communities; and a replicable precedent for inclusive arts collaboration on critical issues will be created.
2014 grant recipients – totaling $75K – were Intercambio de Comunidades, the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition and the Child Learning Center at the University of Colorado.
