In 27th round of funding, Boston Resiliency Fund awards grants totaling over $780,000 to 39 organizations

Mayor Martin J. Walsh and the Boston Resiliency Fund Steering Committee last week announced the Boston Resiliency Fund's 27th funding round. These grants represent over $780,000 in funding to 39 organizations in Boston, serving communities by increasing food and health care access, supporting individuals facing homelessness and assisting seniors. Since its launch at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, $34 million has been raised, and $30.3 million has been distributed to 366 organizations.

"The Boston Resiliency Fund has been an essential provider to Boston nonprofits, building a network of support to help the most vulnerable Bostonians. The organizations granted have been vital to ensuring those most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic are supported," said Mayor Walsh. "Thank you to every organization who has partnered with the City of Boston in providing resources to our community."

Of organizations receiving funding this round, 51 percent are led by a person of color and 64 percent are led by a woman. In total, since the launch of the Fund, 56 percent of the organizations that received funding are led by a percent of color and 58 percent are led by a woman. Seventy-six percent of organizations serve Dorchester, 70 percent serve Roxbury, 65 percent serve Mattapan, and 56 percent serve Hyde Park, in addition to every other neighborhood in Boston. To learn more about all Boston Resiliency Fund grant recipients and their work, visit our grantees website.

"Young Man with a Plan, a four year mentoring program for Black and Latino males, is so grateful to the City of Boston Resiliency Fund for our initial funding and really honored to receive a second grant. Delivering direct food relief fulfills a real need and also provides us the opportunity to check in on the wellbeing of our young men and their families," said Jaykyri Simpson, Director of Young Man with a Plan. "We see the compound traumas of COVID, financial loss, racial injustice, and neighborhood violence that our young men are experiencing. We engage in what we call 'intrusive coaching'-- persistently talking to our kids about their schoolwork, housing and food security, safety, and mental health."

"Common cathedral not only never closed; common cathedral was one of the very few places where we had a voice in response to what was happening to us all," said John, a common cathedral community member. "common cathedral and its programs, common art and Boston Warm, gave our community agency over our own lives within the pandemic. We saw these spaces become not just a refuge from the disease, but a place to feel that we were actively fighting back and retaining our identity. Boston Warm will now be expanding to Fridays because the community of people experiencing homelessness requested it, planned it and will be helping to run. We are able to do this meaningful work because of the funding from the Boston Resiliency Fund.  We are grateful to the City!" 

"We are deeply honored by the recognition and faith the Boston Resiliency Fund has shown in our work at Rose's Bounty. This year has been a tough year for our neighbors already facing food insecurity, and for those who now find themselves in this situation for the first time. Serving twice as many families as we did in 2019, Rose's Bounty now serves over 950 Families per month; feeding 2700+ individuals every month," said Darra Slagle, Executive Director of Rose's Bounty. "With the help of this grant, we can meet many of the increased costs associated with the pandemic. Rose's Bounty has worked tirelessly to adapt to these changing times in order to make sure that families and seniors in West Roxbury, Roslindale, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain and Hyde Park have access to fresh and healthy foods." 

This funding round represents support for organizations working to provide basic needs to youth, families and seniors, assist youth and young adults facing homelessness, expand food access, and increase accessibility to healthcare, including COVID-19 testing. 

2Life Communities Inc.: 2Life Communities will use this BRF grant to deliver emergency frozen meals and provide emergency boxes containing produce, perishables, shelf-stable supplies, and personal care items. They will also use the grant to connect residents equitably to services, programming, and telehealth/telemedicine, and conduct intensive disinfection to protect the health and safety of residents and frontline essential workers.  

Advocates: Advocates will use this BRF grant to support families that care for a loved one who has a developmental/intellectual disability. These families also have a reduced income and are also balancing remote learning, while sometimes struggling with a language barrier.  With support from the Boston Resiliency Fund, they will provide families with stipends to buy essential items like food and hygiene products.

BEST Corp. Hospitality Training: BEST Corp. will use this BRF grant to provide grocery gift cards to families struggling because of the pandemic. They will continue to use their Local 26 network to determine the people most in need.

Boston BullPen Project, Inc.: The Boston BullPen Project will use this BRF grant to continue to help people facing eviction, homelessness, food insecurity, technology deficits and medical crises. 

Boston Girls Empowerment Network: Boston Girls Empowerment Network will use this BRF grant to support immigrant women ages 18-40, who are financially impacted by the COVID-19 Crisis. BGEN will expand its staff by hiring a women's service coordinator and work across ethnic communities to create support services, which includes food and personal/feminine hygiene products distribution for undocumented women who are unemployed, underemployed and are not be able to collect state or federal unemployment benefits.

Boston Missionary Baptist Community Center Inc.: Boston Missionary Baptist Community Center will use this BRF grant to distribute food from their pantry in Roxbury, deliver food door-to-door throughout the week to seniors and people with disabilities, and work in partnership with local partners who host distribution at locations around Boston and nearby communities. In addition, they will train and deploy volunteers to provide nutrition guidance and respond to signs of COVID-19 and advise them about social distancing.

Breaktime: Breaktime will use this BRF grant to support young adults experiencing homelessness with living-wage employment and deliver groceries to families in need through their non-profit partners.

Building Audacity: Building Audacity's will use this BRF grant to offset costs of their grocery delivery program.

Call for Action: Call for Action will use this BRF grant for outreach and educational workshops in Spanish about COVID-19 testing, prevention, and education. These materials will also include information about the vaccine once it is available to the general public. They will create digital content and do educational workshops, forums, and digital support groups.  

Cape Verdean Association of Boston: The Cape Verdean Association of Boston  will use this BRF grant to partner with local restaurants and grocery stores to provide an ethnically-appropriate hot dinner to seniors. In addition, they will be working with low-income families, undocumented immigrants, and the older Bostonians to connect them to City and State resources and provide them with weekly grocery bags filled with fresh produce and food, gift cards, interpretation, and translation services about COVID-19 information.

Catholic Charitable Bureau of the Archdiocese of Boston, Inc.: Catholic Charities will use BRF funding to support staff who are packing and distributing food bags to more than 1,500 households at their pantries in Dorchester and in the South End. The two pantries distribute approximately 80,000 pounds of food each week.

Catie's Closet, Inc: Catie's Closet will use the BRF to fund basic essentials, including toiletries, feminine products, socks, underwear and clothing. This will help close gaps in product availability for people of color by improving and meeting the need for culturally-appropriate products.

Children's Services of Roxbury: Children's Services of Roxbury will use this Boston Resiliency Fund grant to support the families in their homeless shelters, home-based childcare programs, and their behavioral health programs. In addition, this grant will support education and access to COVID-19 testing, deliver gift cards to families to purchase food and basic needs, and provide bags of groceries.

City Mission, Inc.:  City Mission will use this BRF grant to purchase online gift cards for groceries and essential items and distribute the cards to the families on their waiting list. In addition, City Mission will provide information about additional available community resources, and support families facing special circumstances or challenges.

Common Cathedral: Common Cathedral will use this BRF grant to expand their Boston Warm day center to include Fridays from January through April. The day center provides people experiencing homelessness access to bathrooms, food, essential supplies and a safe space to warm up.

Community Servings:  Community Servings will use this BRF grant to cover raw food costs, packaging, and home-delivery of 650 medically-tailored Blizzard Boxes, containing a week's worth of shelf-stable meals, a recipe booklet to support understanding of the box contents and easy meal preparation. Each box will also contain disposable masks. In addition, Community Servings will use this BRF grant to support safety and sanitation costs, including weekly electrostatic cleaning of their kitchens and delivery vans and masks for their kitchen staff, drivers, and volunteers.

Dignity Matters, Inc.: Dignity Matters will use this BRF grant to distribute menstrual care products to women in Boston through their COVID-19 partners. They will allocate the items purchased through this grant to the Greater Boston YMCA, Family Aid Boston and Catie's Closet/BPS Emergency Centers. 

Elizabeth Stone House: Elizabeth Stone House will use the BRF grant to ensure the safety and emergency daily needs for clients including food, prescription medicine, personal hygiene products, and disinfection services. In addition, the grant will ensure the safety of clients and staff from COVID-19 exposure and to ensure the continuity of emergency staff payments for direct service on-site staff at their emergency shelter /transitional housing location.

FamilyAid Boston: FamilyAid Boston will use the BRF grant to continue to deliver high-quality fresh food to 870 homeless and unstably-housed children and parents, while keeping them safe from community spread of the coronavirus. 

Families First Parenting Programs, Inc: Families First will use this BRF grant to provide grocery store gift cards for parents attending their programming to purchase food and basic needs items. 

The First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain: The First Church in Jamaica Plain will use this BRF grant to purchase additional food, equipment and supplies for the pantry. Additionally, this grant will support the Food Pantry Program Coordinator, who works directly with food insecure households to assess needs and oversees volunteers and the delivery of groceries. 

Hyde Square Task Force: Hyde Square Task Force will use this BRF grant to support their ongoing efforts to provide youth and low-income families of color with gift cards that enable them to purchase food and groceries. 

Livable Streets Alliance: This BRF grant will provide continued support for the LivableStreets "ChatBot," an interactive tool that monitors Boston EMS staff for COVID-like illness symptoms. This tool is important for Boston EMS's infection control doctors and nurses to keep the front-line EMTs and paramedics safe. The "ChatBot" tool provides early notification of symptoms, a key to keeping the department safe, and to decrease the spread of the virus.

Love Your Menses, Inc.: Love Your Menses will continue providing menstrual care packages with essential menstrual hygiene items in a reusable bag for people in need. They will also install period product dispensers in community organizations, such as homeless shelters, youth organizations, and community health centers across the city so people can easily access products.

Presentation School Foundation Community Center: Presentation School Foundation Community Center will use this Boston Resiliency Fund grant to support the "Allston-Brighton Pandemic Relief Center" in response to a need for storage space for pandemic relief items. This grant will enable the PSF Community Center to make 750 square feet of space available to Allston-Brighton organizations seeking space to store and disseminate pandemic relief items including, but not limited to, food, diapers, toiletries, school supplies.

Rosie's Place: Rosie's Place will use this BRF grant to continue to serve hundreds of women experiencing homelessness each day by providing prepared and to-go meals from their dining room, and a week's worth of groceries from their food pantry.  

Rose's Bounty COVID Surge Support: Rose's Bounty will use this BRF grant to procure food as well as to purchase COVID-19 safety items.

Rounding the Bases: Rounding the Bases will use this BRF grant to conduct virtual training classes to teach seniors basic computer skills.

Silver Lining Mentoring: Silver Lining Mentoring will use this BRF grant to provide financial help for basic utility bills and food for 50 families. 

Sociedad Latina: Sociedad Latina will use this BRF grant to pay for their alumni Youth Leaders who outreach in Mission Hill/Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The Youth Leaders will distribute Personal Protective Equipment and bilingual reading materials on the importance of mask wearing and social distancing. This campaign targets young Latinos and immigrants and their families to take measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and contribute to keeping their community healthy. 

The South Boston Association of Non-Profits (SBANP): The South Boston Association of Non-Profits will bring together nine partner organizations and use the BRF grant to bring fresh food, perishable and non-perishable food items, grocery store gift cards, and prepared meals to vulnerable populations of children, families and seniors in South Boston. Those nine organizations will also help provide health, safety and hygiene items such as diapers, wipes, hand sanitizer, and cleaning products to families and seniors who are struggling to access them during the pandemic.

South Boston en Accion, Inc.: South Boston en Accion will use this BRF grant to purchase needed supplies, create PPE kits, available at two central distribution points at Boston Housing Authority buildings in South Boston. Kits will contain disposable masks, hand sanitizer, hand soap, disinfectant wipes, and useful information.  

St. Stephen's Youth Programs: St. Stephen's Youth Programs will use the BRF grant to support families through cash assistance and grocery store gift cards. 

Tifereth Raphael Inc: Tifereth Raphael will use this BRF grant to support storage costs that will help optimize their kosher food pantry facility in Brighton. 

We Are Better Together The Warren Daniel Hairston Project: We Are Better Together will use this BRF grant to identify, reach out, and engage the individuals and families at risk of domestic or other violence. They will provide information on community forums/workshops and existing community resources to address violence, trauma and community healing. We Are Better Together will also provide gift cards and essential supplies to people in need.  

West End House Inc.: Due to the loss of USDA Farmers to Families boxes, West End House will use this BRF grant to support the purchase of similar produce boxes from Fresh Truck, as well as food purchases from Greater Boston Food Bank, and the costs associated with delivering and storing food. Groceries will be distributed every two weeks through volunteer led delivery to elderly or disabled individuals, or families without transportation.

Wilahmena's Place Inc.: Wilahmena's Place Inc. will use this BRF grant to sustain their efforts to provide non-perishables, fresh fruit and vegetables, toiletries, sanitizer, soap, cleaning supplies and gift cards to students, seniors and families in need, with a focus on the Grove Hall neighborhood. 

Young Man with a Plan: Young Man with a Plan will use this BRF grant to deliver food gift cards and food to students and families.

Youth Vybz Inc.: Youth Vybz Inc. will use the BRF for fresh vegetable pre-packaged food care boxes, PPE and gift cards.