Rivers Givers Award Grants to Three Local Nonprofits

 

This assembly is the culmination of a yearlong curriculum that teaches the concepts of philanthropy and how the grant process works. After soliciting suggestions from the Rivers community and doing their own research, the group selected nine organizations to send requests for proposals to, visited those nine sites, and ultimately settled on three organizations to support with the proceeds from their fund-raising efforts.

 

Zumix is a nonprofit organization based in East Boston that is dedicated to empowering youth through music and the arts by helping young people build confidence and learn skills that will help them reach their full potential. Zumix offers summer and after-school programming for the underserved neighborhood and will be taking their youth-run community radio station from an online stream to the FM airwaves beginning in June.

 

Circle of Hope is a Needham-based nonprofit that collects and distributes supplies to individuals and families both in homeless shelters and in transition to more permanent housing. The grant money Circle of Hope has received from Rivers will go toward a “Baby Basket” project that will send supplies to new mothers who are living in homeless shelters throughout Boston. Rivers students will help put these baskets together on RISE Day this coming May.

 

Heading Home is a nonprofit that has provided emergency, transitional, and permanent housing and support services to low-income and homeless families in the Greater Boston area for more than 40 years. The grant money received from Rivers will be directed toward a support program Heading Home offers that allows their families to throw birthday parties for their children.

 

After the assembly, the Rivers Givers held a reception in Nonesuch Café with parents and the organization representatives where they shared what they learned from the experience and answered questions about the process from their guests.

 

“The biggest takeaway I’ve had is getting to know the business aspect of nonprofits,” Trevor Ballantyne ’17 said. “Working with the budgets firsthand and seeing how big our contributions to certain nonprofits are was really interesting.”

 

“This was my second year in Rivers Givers and this year was different because I learned more about why people start nonprofits,” Sarah Baker ’16 said. “It just takes normal people, like us, to see people in need in the community and now going forward – away from Rivers – I could see myself starting my own nonprofit.”

 

It is reflections like these that illustrate the power Rivers’ service learning curriculum, and Rivers Givers in particular, can have and will have on the Greater Boston and global nonprofit communities.

 

“It energized me to hear the presentation and I get choked up hearing that some of you are thinking about what you could do in the future, and it doesn’t have to be far away,” said Barbara Waterhouse, Executive Director of Circle of Hope. “A nonprofit should be someone’s passion that you invite other people to join and I think that you all have the capacity, using what you’ve learned here, to effect great change.”