INDIANAPOLIS — Projects working to help Hoosier families and individuals escape poverty have received a $125,000 boost in the form of the inaugural round of Faith & Action Project grants. Organizers had intended to award $100,000, but increased the grant pool after reviewing proposals.
Six area programs will receive grants aimed at helping them expand their reach and impact. Selected programs range from those that teach job skills and money management to those that provide legal services and help formerly homeless children succeed in school.
The grant recipients are:
• Edna Martin Christian Center, American Baptist Churches of Greater Indianapolis and Eastern Star Church to assist families in the 46218 zip code by increasing the number of stable households. Program activities include working to bring more families into homes that are being built or refurbished in the neighborhood, providing education support and mentoring, assisting in employment readiness and acquisition, and ensuring basic needs are met.
• Goodwill’s New Beginnings to fund a six-month transitional jobs programs for formerly incarcerated persons. Participants work four days a week at Goodwill Commercial Services or Retail Outlet locations and spend one day a week in a six-hour class focused on life-skill development and stabilization activities.
• Purposeful Design for its program to teach woodworking and job-readiness to men emerging from addiction or homelessness. The grant will help expand and improve its production facility in order to employ more men, as well as launch a new School of Woodworking and Discipleship to train men and youth in woodworking, employment readiness and Godly living. Purposeful Design will be relocating from the Little Flower neighborhood to just across the street in Otterbein.
• Broadway United Methodist Church for a program aimed at improving families’ economic mobility. Modeled after a program created by Families Independence Initiative, the program would build small groups around families, provide families with stipends in return for completing certain activities, and require families to set and pursue three goals that would improve their economic mobility.
• Trinity Episcopal Church for Trinity House, which will offer a safe environment for 16-to-21-year-old people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. In addition to getting shelter, the youths staying at Trinity House will have access to legal services, life-skills training, assistance with education and job training, and facilitated connections to other community service agencies.
• School on Wheels for a program that helps families recover from the impact of recent homelessness by providing post-shelter education services. Funds will help provide educational assessments after a family moves out of a homeless shelter, school enrollment assistance, school supplies and uniform assistance, transportation stipends, and parent workshops to help parent engage in their child’s education.
Launched in 2016, the Faith & Action Project at Christian Theological Seminary is supported from the Mike and Sue Smith Family Fund as a multiyear effort to help reduce poverty in Indianapolis. In addition to providing grants, the Faith & Action Project has held communitywide events and attracted national poverty experts to Central Indiana.
The six projects will be highlighted at the Faith & Action Project’s next public event, which is the evening of November 8. More details on that will be announced soon.
