Over 40 years ago a generous member of our congregation made a donation to First Parish in Lincoln to provide support for charitable causes both she and First Parish believed in. To qualify the core mission of the organization must be to provide services or advocacy consistent with the original gift, for example; affordable housing, enrichment programs for youth, health and human services, social justice, disaster relief, protecting our natural environment. Since it’s inception the original bequest has provided support to dozens of worthy organizations.
The Outreach Committee is pleased to announce the 2025 recipients:
REACH: Beyond Domestic Violence – $25,000
Waltham, MA
https://reachma.org
A survivor may be forced to stay with an abuser due to concerns about economic stability. When a survivor does leave the relationship, they often have little or no knowledge about financial matters. With this grant, REACH’s new Economic Empowerment Program will transform the situation by reversing the enforced ignorance foisted on domestic abuse survivors. By learning about how finances work, they are empowered to take responsibility for their own decisions and gain the skills and knowledge to build their own future. This program will start in the spring of 2025 and continue into the foreseeable future. It’s a weekly curriculum for a 12 session program. The sessions will teach financial literacy, budgeting, saving, building and repairing credit, how to work with a bank including conducting online banking, and job readiness training. In addition, an ongoing element of the educational process will be offering IDA savings incentives in the form of a dollar for dollar match. The first year they aim to enroll 8 to 10 survivors through these and other trainings and activities. Participants will become more knowledgeable and empowered to make positive choices that will transform their lives.
Healthy Waltham – $20,430
Waltham, MA
https://healthywaltham.org/
Healthy Waltham is the only nonprofit food relief program and only health promotion organization providing free programming for the entire community of Waltham. Their twice monthly pantries serve an average of 750 to 800 families per pantry twice a month. During FY 24 they served approximately 3160 households representing approximately 9500 family members. That is over 1,000,000 pounds of food valued at nearly $1.8 million.
This grant will be used to purchase equipment for their new 2500 square-foot two-story building at 123 Felton St. – the first space that they can call their own since founding 10 years ago. Seventy five percent of the construction is complete, and they’ve already raised the majority of the funding needed to bring this project to life. They have plans to open later in 2025 or early 2026.
Specifically, the funding will be used to buy three glass door refrigerators, three glass door freezers, 24 shopping carts, compact Baylor, pallet jack, and dry shelving. This new equipment will help to create more efficient, safe and accessible storage and distribution. Clients will more readily be able to view and carry items and will have greater access to fresh and perishable goods. Overall, this equipment will help improve logistics, maximize storage capacity and ensure food safety, and create a smoother more respectful shopping experience for those in need.
Partakers – $25,000
Auburndale, MA
https://www.partakers.org/
The Partakers College Behind Bars program is a small nonprofit organization, dedicated to reducing prison recidivism rates by providing access to higher education and community mentoring for incarcerated women and men in Massachusetts prisons and follow up support post incarceration via an established reentry initiative. Partaker’s current recidivism rate is 2%. The national average is 66% for three years 82% for 10 years.
This project will address the need to reduce prison recidivism rates in Massachusetts by helping to support the expansion of their College Behind Bars Reentry Program by partially funding the salary of a newly hired program coordinator.
