More Grants

I'm back at work after three beautiful months of disability/bonding leave. I'm seeing a few grants that might be interesting for Newburghers:

Preserve New York program offers grants to municipalities and non-profit organizations for historic structure reports, historic landscape reports, and cultural resource surveys. Typical awards are between $3,000 and $10,000.

Scotts Miracle-Gro is giving community organizations up to $1,500 in money and in-kind support for gardening and community beautification projects.

Dollar General is offering up to $5,000 in Back-to-School literacy grants to assist school libraries and media centers. They are also awarding up to $3,000 to schools, public libraries and non-profit organizations for Youth Literacy programs.

M.A.C. AIDS Fund is awarding up to $25,000 for programs that provide food and nutrition to people living with HIV or AIDS.

Women Helping Others (W.H.O.) will support grass-roots programs serving the overlooked needs of women and children with grants up to $40,000.

JustFilms, an initiative from Ford Foundation, awards grants to film, video and digital works that show courageous people confronting difficult issues and actively pursuing a more just, secure and sustainable world.

Cinereach is also funding full-length fiction and non-fiction films, with up to $50,000 per project.

Let me know if you have a particular area for which you'd like to find funding.

Community Grant for Collaborations with Police

From the Foundation Directory RFP Alerts:

Applications Invited for MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Awards Program

Deadline: February 28, 2011

The MetLife Foundation and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation are partnering for the tenth year to recognize, sustain, and share the work of innovative partnerships between community groups and police to promote neighborhood safety and revitalization.

The MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Awards program invites applications from partnerships that exhibit tangible accomplishments in their efforts to advance the process, outcome, and evaluation of potent police-community collaborations. Eligible applicants must be member organizations of partnerships that include, but need not be limited to, community organizations and police.

Awardees receive a monetary grant and their work will be promoted via case studies to a wide audience of practitioners, policymakers, and academics.

The program will award grants in the following two categories:

Neighborhood Revitalization Awards (six awards of $15,000 to $25,000 each): These awards celebrate exemplary collaborations between community groups and police that yield crime reduction as well as economic development outcomes such as real estate development, business attraction, and job growth.

Special Strategy Awards (five awards of $15,000 each) will be given to community and police partners who have achieved significant accomplishments in applied technology, aesthetics and greenspace improvement, diversity inclusion and integration, drug market disruption, gang prevention and youth safety, and seniors and safety.

Program information and the full Request for Proposals are available at the LISC Web site:

http://www.lisc.org/section/ourwork/national/safety/awards

Straight from the oven

The baby is here!! He was born January 4, exactly on his due date.

He's already being outfitted in the season's hottest knitwear:

Both are courtesy of my friend, Toni. She hand dyes her own yarn and uses tooth picks (or something equally small and impossible) to knit.

We've been so preoccupied with the baby that the house has been sitting idle. Eddie is still working on the State and Federal Historic Preservation Tax Credit applications, but it might not matter. Sadly, this past week he learned that the two City of Newburgh grants he applied for kind of fell through.

He had received a letter stating that his applications were approved and had verbal confirmation that the full amount he was asking for had been set aside, but now the loan committee will only award him a small portion of what he applied for, so it looks like the house won't be fixed up anytime soon and he'll be one of those vacant property landlords that we have been railing against. It's sad, but part of the reality of Newburgh, I guess. I just wish he hadn't wasted so much time on it (since April, 2010).

In the meantime, we're learning a lot about local politics and trying to enjoy Newburgh. One of the best things we've come across is this bbq restaurant, Christine's, on Broadway. The smoked ribs, fried chicken, brisket and smoked chicken are AMAZING, as well as the collard greens, baked mac 'n cheese, coleslaw, potato salad, and sweet potato fries. We've ordered take out three times in the past two weeks.

Kingston Craft Fair

One Mile Gallery Craft Fair is happening this weekend, December 11 and 12, from 12pm to 5pm. I'm trying to buy local this year, and already planned on sending Christmas cards from Thornwillow Press and peanut butter brittle from Commodore Chocolatier on Broadway. The craft fair is in Kingston, so it won't be a Newburgh-area spending spree, but some items are super cute:


(Photos via One Mile Gallery website.)

Baby news

I was feeling a little sorry for myself this weekend, being 35 weeks pregnant and uncomfortable sitting, standing, and lying on my side...until I read that African elephants are pregnant for 22 MONTHS. Their calves are between 175 and 250 lbs, and nurse for 4 to 5 years, or until the next calf is born.

On the plus side, they don't have a 20% copay on their medical insurance, so they won't be in debt immediately after giving birth.

Grants for Newburgh

I came across three grant opportunities recently that I thought some organization in Newburgh would be interested in. One is for the City of Newburgh - maybe someone in the Planning and Development Office would be interested in applying?

Project Orange Thumb
Sponsored by Fiskars, 10 winners will receive $5,000 in cash and tools to support neighborhood beautification through community gardening, and one winner will receive a complete community garden makeover. The deadline to apply is December 31, 2010.

IBM Smart Cities Challenge
The application for the Smarter Cities Challenge must be signed by an executive officer of a municipality or local government, whose title varies by location – for example, s/he may be the mayor, city manager, chief administrative officer, county manager, county executive, etc. The most successful proposals will:

• Describe 1-3 potential problems or opportunities to address with the grant
  
  
• Provide clear, compelling evidence that the city is well positioned to utilize the resources offered in the Smarter Cities Challenge
  
  
• Outline how a grant of IBM talent and technology has the potential to substantially enhance the city's capacity to act on key issues
  
  
• Highlight recent efforts to develop innovative solutions to public problems, including any initiatives to implement new technologies or open data policies
  
  
• Demonstrate the city is ready to match IBM's investment with its own commitment of time and talent, including access to the city agencies and personnel relevant to the project

The deadline to apply is December 31, 2010.

JPMorgan Chase
The bank supports non-profits in communities where there is a Chase presence, and Newburgh definitely fits. You have to root around on the website a little to get the full scope of what they will support, but briefly, they support green initiatives (green building, green jobs, sustainable development), employment training, affordable housing, education, and arts and culture. I've included wording directly from their website:

Targeting Challenged Neighborhoods

The JPMorgan Chase Foundation directs the majority of its time, attention and investment toward specific neighborhoods in cities where we have major operations. These neighborhoods are typically among the most challenged areas of major urban centers, defined by unacceptably high rates of poverty and historic disinvestment. JPMorgan Chase works to lead a renaissance in the neighborhood, by engaging the most qualified non-profit organizations, neighborhood residents, and other sources of public and private advocacy and funding.

The firm's philanthropic investment in these targeted neighborhoods is predominantly focused in three centers of excellence:

Community Development

Our strategic focus is to work with community-based partners to address issues related to poverty and social exclusion by building economic infrastructure, promoting self-sufficiency, and supporting efforts to narrow social inequities.

What we support:

1. Resident-focused programming that addresses: workforce development; asset building, and financial literacy:
   • Continuing Education Courses
   • Adult Literacy Outreach
   • Job Training
   • Money Management Basics
   • Credit Repair
   • EITC Workshops
   • Homeownership / Homebuyer Workshops
   • Foreclosure Prevention
2. Community-focused programming that addresses: economic development and affordable housing:
   • Economic Planning
   • Small Business Technical Assistance & Financing
   • Job Creation
   • Affordable Housing Development & Preservation

Education

Our strategic focus is to ensure that all children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, have access to high quality educational opportunities with a particular focus on K-12 public schools that help them acquire the knowledge and skills needed to be productive, engaged students.

What we support:

1. Development of instructional leaders
2. Implementation of innovative curricula
3. Deepen teacher content knowledge
4. Strengthening of instructional strategies
5. Strengthening district capacity to support innovation
6. Extending learning opportunities
7. College access initiatives
8. Dissemination of best practices

Arts & Culture

Our strategic focus is to increase community access to rich cultural resources that foster creativity, promote self-expression, celebrate diversity, and strengthen our environment.

What we support:

1. Arts programs in schools and after school
2. Build capacity of community-based arts institutions
3. Broaden access to artistic excellence and diversity by partnering with major arts and culture groups

Working Weekend

Fall! The scenery is gorgeous right now, and we enjoyed it on a leisurely drive through Cornwall-on-Hudson/Storm King/West Point following Route 218. It was so hard to motivate ourselves to work on the house, but we finally did.

First, we scraped a paint sample from the side of the house, and matched it at Home Depot. Then we set to work covering the graffiti on the three sides of the house.

Before:



After:



The last square:


Then we decided to plant some shrubs in the front yard. We planted two limelight hydrangeas, two asters, and two...shrubs.

Before:


Mid-way:


After:


Admittedly, I didn't do much since gardening is backbreaking work! ...and the whole congenital toxoplasmosis thing. Sometime soon, we'll get a grinder and remove the iron fence. We'd love to save it, but it's too far gone.

And finally, Halloween! We didn't get ANY trick-or-treaters, so the only person Eddie could scare was me.