The Sedona Performing Arts Center hosted this year’s Arizona Community Foundation of Sedona annual grant award ceremony on Dec. 7, which awarded $276,000 to 49 charities and schools across the Verde Valley.
ACF is supported by regional field-of-interest funding and other sources, finds needs in the community and matches them with philanthropic support. This year’s grantees each received between $1,100 and $10,000 and included organizations operating in the fields of animal welfare, arts and culture, healthcare, social welfare and justice, environment, community and education.
“This year was extra special, as the Burton Family Foundation, a support organization of the Arizona Community Foundation, provided an additional $320,000 to organizations that applied for the cycle,” ACF Regional Director Jennifer Perry said. “In many cases matching the amount granted by ACF.”
Those funds from the Burton Family Foundation will benefit the Verde Valley Homeless Coalition to the amount of $167,500 for capital improvements and to pay for a new staff member. Hope House of Sedona received $34,700 from the Burton Family Foundation with $6,300 from ACF of Sedona to pay for two part-time staffers to manage their family transitional home.
The Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District received direct support for most of its campuses, as well as indirect support through awards made to several of its partners including Low Income Student Aid, the Science Vortex of the Verde Valley, Girls on the Run of Northern Arizona and others.
“But there’s also the Verde Valley Wheel Fun. They’ve done tremendous [work] building our mountain bike tracks providing these programs for kids, and that’s across all four of our schools,” COCSD Superintendent Steve King said. “I can’t say enough about ACF and what they’ve done for us in supporting our programs. There’s even more that had been helped. Look at the [Clemenceau Heritage Museum] … they provide the education program for our students as well. To have those volunteers be able to get up and down the stairs to get those collections is huge.”
$10,000 went to the Low Income Student Association, which provides direct aid to Verde Valley students in need and has plans to expand to West Sedona School.
“We provide aid to individual students that are not in the scope of classroom assistance,” LISA President Kelcy Lyons said. “So it’s to individuals, whether it be clothing, shoes, sometimes we assist with after-school care, or extracurricular activities. If a student wants to play a sport and can’t afford the equipment, or the pay to play fee, then we provide assistance. We also provide aid to students in terms of instructional materials that the students may need; if they’re deficient in any areas and need to [reach] grade level, then a teacher might have submitted an aid request,and we provide those materials to help the student.”
Another of the grantees, Girls on the Run of Northern Arizona, is a national organization with local chapters that uses physical activity to teach girls self-confidence and life lessons. The organization’s leaders went into the evening anticipating a $3,000 grant and said they were thrilled to learn that they would be receiving an additional $3,000.
“It’s third through eighth grade. And so we’re really about teaching them social emotional learning skills,like empathy, building healthy friendships, being a good friend, standing up to bullies and giving back to your community,” Northern Arizona Council Director Kelly Teeselink said. “[Over] 10 weeks, they train to complete a 5K. We’re not trying to build like elite runners or anything like that. We are trying to give girls confidence through achievement and setting out to do something that they aren’t really sure they can do.”
An additional $5,000 went to the Sedona Community Food Bank for its “The Power of Protein” program that enables the food bank to purchase rarely-donated items such as milk and cheese for residents.
“The power of protein is we as people need protein to survive, children need protein to do better in school, adults need [it] to function and so we wrote the grant to provide those items,” food bank Executive Director Cathleen Healy-Baiza said. “I think we rarely get those items because it’s just more expensive.”
Northern Arizona Restorative Justice received $6,600 to train volunteer facilitators, Executive Director Jeremy Hawkes explained.
“We approach education, community and anybody incarcerated or with infractions to learn from the mistakes that have been made, or heal the harm that’s been presented within the community or their relationships or with themselves,” Hawkes said. “We’re about not creating punitive consequences, we’re about going in a direction of integrating people back into the community.”
“We’re just happy to kick off the holiday giving season with this event, and equipping the community with a list of projects that still need funding,” Perry said. “We’re proud of the amount of money that we were able to award to these organizations, but the need is far greater than our resources allow us to support. We hope that others will leverage all the work and research that we did to make these grants to help inform their giving.”
The ACF grant panel also compiles the Northern Arizona Giving Guide, which is an annual list of projects they would have funded if possible and can be found on the ACF website.
For more information on charitable giving, contact Perry at jperry@azfoundation. org or (928) 399-7218.
