January Grant Highlights

← Back to Blog February 6, 2018 by Grantmaking, Nonprofit, Strengthening Cleveland
Three kids mixing paint and working on a painting during art class at school

We’re delighted to kick off 2018 with a great first month of grantmaking! In January we made a variety of grants – totaling nearly $3.4 million – to organizations serving residents of Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties. Here are just a few highlights:

  • $14,580 to A Kid at Art for the Heart to allow underserved children in Lake County to engage in and access exploratory arts. A Kid at Art for the Heart provides mobile art education for underserved children primarily in Lake and Geauga counties. Our support will allow the organization to deliver art classes at Lake Geauga United Head Start, engaging more than 100 three-to-five year olds in classes via a mobile arts classroom.
  • $50,000 to Cleveland Classical Guitar Society (CCGS) to continue the expansion of a classical guitar mastery program to a new site in the Clark Fulton neighborhood at the City Life Center, and to add summer classes to provide year-round mastery guitar opportunities for all youth in the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society Program. CCGS currently provides in-school programs that serve 200 students per year, and will now offer more flexible lessons that better meet the needs of Cleveland students, ultimately giving the most talented and dedicated guitar students a path to mastery. This grant is part of the Cleveland Foundation’s arts mastery initiative.
  • $50,000 to Envision Excellence in STEM Education, to support the introduction and implementation of computational literacy curriculum and tools in Cleveland Metropolitan School District K-8 schools. This support is part of a CS for CLE initiative that aims to provide computer science classes to all CMSD students. This new support now introduces computational thinking skills at the elementary school level, including a professional development course for CMSD teachers, and the integration of “E4Tech” computer science and math curriculum in elementary classrooms.
  • $120,235 to United Way Services of Geauga County, which has united people and resources to improve the lives of Geauga County residents since the early 1960s. Our grant supports the implementation of their Geauga County Reentry Collaborative (GCRC), which assists individuals reentering the community and their families. Our support will help UWSGC continue to develop the collaborative, including increasing onsite services (anger management, life skills, employment and career training) and develop a sustainability plan to keep the program going.
  • $175,080 to the East End Neighborhood House (EENH), now in its 110th year serving the Buckeye-Woodland Hills community. In 2015, we awarded EENH a grant to implement a plan that ultimately created a Chief of Operations position, allowing the center to pursue and achieve a Step Up to Quality 5-star rating for its early childhood education program, as well as partnerships with nearby schools for after-school programming. This new grant will allow EENH to sustain the Chief of Operations role, support the expansion of its early childhood program to include infants and more after-school program, and redesign their website.
  • $99,500 to Neighborhood Family Practice (NFP), a community health center that has served Cleveland’s west side for 36 years, currently operating five health centers and two primary care sites. Our grant supports technological advances for NFP, including a scalable and integrated accounting system to help manage data collection and reporting, updates to their network and related technology training.
  • $168,000 to Visiting Nurses Association of Ohio (VNAO), which provides nursing care, mental healthcare, rehab therapies, hospice and private-duty services. VNAO offers the largest scope of home-based services for thousands of patients across the Northeast and Mid-Ohio regions, predominantly serving low-income and Medicare patients. Our grant supports VNAO’s partnership with the Visiting Nursing Association Health Group (VNAHG), a leading nonprofit provider of home health services. Our grant supports the purchase of staff software licenses for clinical modules in a health information technology (HIT) platform, which will allow VNAO to access real-time data for decision-making and delivery of services and modernize its technology through the VNAHG’s system.

These are just a few of our January grants. Follow our grantmaking each month – and get the latest news from the Cleveland Foundation – by signing up for our monthly e-newsletter here.