The Omaha Community Foundation is pleased to announce another round of Community Resilience Fund grant recipients. Three local nonprofits, serving those disproportionately affected by COVID-19, received funds totaling $65,000.
Launched in April 2021, the Community Resilience Fund focuses on providing grants in the following areas: Arts & Culture, Housing, Learning Recovery, Mental Health, and Workforce.
Since then, 24 nonprofits have received a total of $350,090.75, thanks to generous community support. Anyone can donate.
Grants Made in August 2021
LEARNING RECOVERY: Supporting enrichment programs and activities to reverse disparities that grew due to remote learning and other educational disruptions.
> Boys Town: $25,000 for LIFT Together. LIFT Together services stabilize families by partnering with children, parents, community service providers, and educators to keep them safe, in their homes, academically on track and out of risk from entering the juvenile justice or child welfare systems. LIFT services help students, families, and educators in North and South Omaha schools to address immediate issues such as relationship problems, childhood behaviors, isolation, limited supports, unmet basic needs, and academic issues, including those related to remote learning and learning loss. These services are especially important as children have transitioned back to the classroom after months of remote learning.
> Gotta Be Me: $15,000 for general operating support. Gotta Be Me has provided daily Zoom sessions related to learning, engagement, and socialization to combat isolation for individuals with disabilities and their families. The gap in continuing education for individuals with disabilities has historically been lagging and the deficit is highlighted to an even greater degree due to remote learning with little to no in-home supports. Gotta Be Me, in partnership with the Omaha Public Schools Transition Program, provides direct programming to students in adaptive curriculum classes who continue to learn remotely. They are providing weekend programming to boost a multitude of subjects for participants who are still in school and to those who have aged out of special needs classrooms. Gotta Be Me estimates that it is providing over 10 times the amount of programming in response to the pandemic in comparison to typical years.
WORKFORCE: Helping people gain new skills or education to find and secure stable employment.
> Nebraska Center for Workforce Development & Education: $25,000 for Project Reset. During COVID-19, the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services (NDCS) had to dramatically restrict visitors and access for volunteers who work with the prison population on becoming job-ready and prepared for release. NDCS is now loosening restrictions so that programming can return. However, with the population being released now and with the increase in community supervision cases as the courts catch up on their backlog due to COVID-19, there is a huge need to serve this population so that they do not get left behind in a service capacity. The goal of this program is to place individuals coming out of NDCS or serving a period of community supervision in Omaha and Council Bluffs, into pre-apprenticeship programs. These individuals will start work as a union apprentice with compensation starting at 75% of the journey-worker rate with benefits including health and welfare, training, and pension funds included. The total starting compensation package is greater than $29 per hour. Once participants enter the trade as an apprentice, their wages are governed by a collective bargaining agreement where they will receive pay raises after each period of approximately 1,000 hours of work and training.
