We Raise Foundation Awards $100,000 GrantsPlus Grant to Sunshine Gospel Ministries - We Raise Foundation

We Raise Foundation Awards $100,000 GrantsPlus Grant to Sunshine Gospel Ministries

 In Education

We Raise Foundation is excited to announce we recently awarded a $100,000 three-year GrantsPlus Grant to Sunshine Gospel Ministries in Chicago, Ill., for their “Empowering Youth: Enhancing Academic Success through Tutoring” program.

Since 1905, Sunshine Gospel Ministries has served alongside youth and families in disadvantaged, under-resourced, and disinvested communities throughout Chicago. Today, they offer a wide range of services for residents of the Woodlawn community.

Sunshine is a leading provider of supplemental educational services in Woodlawn. Their youth outreach staff has observed that their students tend to be multiple grade levels behind in math and reading.. Approximately 95% of their elementary program students attend Fiske Elementary School, which, according to research, places in the bottom 50% of test scores with a math proficiency of 3% and a reading proficiency of 8%. Only 25% of Woodlawn residents have a high school degree and just 13% of the population has a bachelor’s degree.

Sunshine Gospel Ministries’ tutoring program is a powerful tool that will provide critical opportunities and necessary resources for youth in Woodlawn. With the grant from We Raise, Sunshine will be able to elevate their program offerings by providing targeted academic intervention to improve reading and math capabilities. This tutoring program builds upon their current homework assistance support by formalizing the approach and bringing in experienced support.

Students doing homework

Sunshine plans to hire eight part-time trained tutors for five hours a week for 32 weeks per year. The planned 32 weeks represent the weeks that Sunshine’s youth outreach programs are in session throughout the school year and summer. During youth outreach school year programs, there is a dedicated hour for each age group to receive homework assistance. The eight tutors will tutor youth in groups of five for 30 minutes two of the four days of programming a week. One day will be dedicated to reading and one day will be dedicated to math. This will allow for the majority of the youth to receive at least one tutoring session per week.

Students being tutored“We Raise is pleased to invest in the work of Sunshine Gospel Ministries,” said Paul Miles, President/CEO of We Raise Foundation. “We believe our two organizations are in complete alignment on creating healthy community. Their work with young people to improve their capacity in education, life skills, and spiritual growth is worthy of our support and we look forward to a long relationship with the team at Sunshine Gospel Ministries.”

We Raise GrantsPlus grants support new and innovative projects in Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Oakland/San Francisco working at the intersection of poverty, violence, and inequality. In addition to the grant award, We Raise will also provide Sunshine Gospel Ministries with critical capacity building services, including a resource development assessment, incentivized crowdfunding campaign, and research to help strengthen and sustain their program.

About We Raise Foundation
Motivated by the belief that freedom is grace in action (Galatians 5:1a), We Raise Foundation partners with Christian nonprofit organizations and emerging leaders working at the intersection of poverty, violence, and inequality. We have a preference for funding solutions within the areas of education, workforce development, and criminal justice and employ a unique approach to our investing by coupling program funding with a variety of robust value-added services that empower our grantees to grow their solutions. As a result of these value-added services, every $1 that donors invest through We Raise multiplies into more than double the benefit to the organizations we support. To learn more, please visit weraise.org. You can also find We Raise on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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