CFT is the custodian of the Caruth Fund, the foundation’s largest endowment donated by William Walter Caruth, Jr. to advance innovative and evidence-based solutions to significant community challenges in the areas of education, public safety, health, and medical and scientific research. Mr. Caruth aspired to combine his heart for giving with the tools of entrepreneurship and scientific inquiry to bring about widespread community improvements, and these grants will advance those goals.
“Our new approach to Caruth grantmaking seeks to increase access for organizations of different sizes both within and across our priority issue areas of education, health, and public safety and their intersections. We’re providing funding not only to projects that are fully implemented or expanding, but also to projects in initial development that we believe will be transformational for our community,” said Nadine Dechausay, community philanthropy director at CFT.
“This group of awards supports a renewed vision of what investing in public safety can be. It reflects our commitment to taking a 360 degree view of public safety, which means paying close attention to factors that build community resilience and prevent crime. That perspective is reflected in grants for parks and greenspace, relationship-building between police and youth, workforce training and access to credit in distressed neighborhoods, and supplemental programs that keep young people on track in school.” said Dechausay.
The below table contains a full list of the new grantees, award amounts, and project descriptions. You can also download the table here as a PDF.
| Grantee Organization and Project Title | Grant Amount and Caruth Focus Area | Project Description |
|---|---|---|
| bcWORKSHOP
Breaking Down |
$124,000
Public Safety |
Social change is often the result of many factors, including the efforts of organizations working in a shared space. This grant will allow bcWORKSHOP to create a Data Ecosystem among three organizations that are trying to improve safety and quality of life in the 75210 zip code. Using a dynamic shared map and community organizing, they will envision how they could work together toward common goals. Frazier Revitalization received a $50,000 grant to support this project with door-to-door surveys. |
| Best in Class
Continued |
$250,000
Education |
The Best in Class Coalition seeks to make grants and align regional funding to support organizations whose work is focused on growing the proportion of students on track for college and career success. Specifically, for the 2019-2020 year, Best in Class is striving to help 3,000 more students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds meet key benchmarks, closing opportunity gaps. To achieve this, Best In Class seeks to fund work aligned to the four levers of the Best In Class strategy, which include attracting, preparing, developing, and retaining effective and diverse teachers and school leaders. |
| Big Thought, Dallas Afterschool, and SMU’s Center on Research and Evaluation
Gamifying Participation: An App for Attendance,
|
$25,000
Education |
Behind Every Door has designed an app that combines a robust data tracking system with a gamified user interface. It has the potential to improve program management and increase engagement in afterschool and other kinds of human services programs. This grant supports the prototyping and evaluation of the Behind Every Door app within each of these organization’s respective contexts. |
| DreamSpring
Expanding |
$20,000
Education, |
In economically distressed areas, small business owners and independent contractors often cannot obtain the credit needed to build or expand their businesses. DreamSpring is leading a discovery effort to map current resources and consider whether an innovative new credit marketplace might fill this gap. This grant will complete the landscape analysis. |
| Elementary Reading Collaborative (Beacon Hill Preparatory Institute, Catch Up & Read, Reading Partners, Readers 2 Leaders)Leveraging Coordination to Improve 3rd Grade Literacy |
Up to $350,000 | For DISD to achieve its goal of improving 3rd grade reading by 20 percentage points, it will need strong partners.
A study by Bain & Company estimates that literacy programs, if strengthened and properly deployed, can contribute 8 percentage points of the projected growth. This grant will equip a first of-its-kind coalition of literacy providers called the Elementary Reading Collaborative to meet this challenge through a data driven learning community hosted by SMU’s Center on Research and Evaluation. |
| Homeward Bound, Inc.
Project SOBER: Using Evidence- Based Treatment to Improve Recovery Outcomes |
$500,000
Health, |
Opioid addiction imposes a significant cost on hospitals, schools, and workplaces, as well as on local first responders, prosecutors, and county jails. Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) is an evidence-based intervention that, when used in conjunction with support services, improves the odds of recovery. This grant allows Homeward Bound to provide access to MAT and leverage available state funding to sustain the program. |
| Interfaith Family ServicesScaling Economic Security: The Family Empowerment Center |
$500,000
Education |
For years, Interfaith Family Services has provided transitional housing, workforce development, and childcare services to working poor families who have become homeless. With the completion of an audacious $2.5 million capital project, they seek to drastically scale up a preventative, nonresidential program. It will combine career and financial coaching for parents with year-round childcare, potentially quadrupling their impact and introducing a significant source of earned income. This grant enables that growth. |
| Kids Vision CoalitionFraming the Future: Vision Care Access for DFW Youth |
$20,000
Education, |
Kids Vision Coalition (KVC) estimates that 35,000 children in North Texas are in need of eye care. They seek to comprehensively serve these children with a campaign that engages schools, parents, and providers to ensure students not only get the glasses they need, but wear them consistently. This grant will enable KVC to work with a consultant to formalize the Coalition membership and model. |
| Lone Star Justice Alliance and Texas A&M
Transformative Justice (TJ) Framework Evaluation |
$20,000 (LSJA) $80,000(A&M) Public Safety |
Emerging adults, ages 17-24, are an overrepresented population in the adult criminal justice system in Texas, which is not equipped to respond to their developmental needs. The mission of the Lone Star Justice Alliance (LSJA) is to redirect youth and emerging adults out of the justice system and into community-based treatment programs. In collaboration with the Commissioner’s Courts in Dallas and Williamson Counties, academic researchers at Harvard and Texas A&M, and CitySquare, this grant will support the first phase of a randomized controlled study of a diversion program called the Transformative Justice (TJ) framework. |
| Project Unity
Together We Learn: Advancing Community- Police Relations |
$475,000
Public Safety |
Project Unity has been a leader in seeking to heal and improve police-community relations through authentic conversations and skills based training. Together We Learn (TWL) is their latest contribution to this effort. With support from this grant, TWL will bring police officers into schools to simulate traffic stop scenarios, as mandated by a new education law, creating a model for the entire state. |
| Southern Gateway Public Green FoundationBridging Communities: Southern Gateway Deck Park |
$200,000
Health, |
Historically, highways have been used to divide. This is true in Dallas where the North South divide is carved into the asphalt by the I-30. In the Southern Sector, there is an emerging East-West divide on either side of the I-35. The West side has seen new investment in the Bishop Arts and Jefferson Boulevard areas, creating some uneasy demographic shifts. The East side is still largely isolated and lacking basic amenities. A plan to build a deck park over I-35 aims to unite this area in ways that spur greater connectivity and shared prosperity, not further displacement. In partnership with the City, regional, and state officials, the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation is overseeing the creation of design and construction documents for this project. This grant is for an equitable development plan to ensure that goals for local inclusion are met. |
| Texas Trees Foundation
Nature Rx: |
$1,200,000
Health |
The Southwestern Medical District is an economic hub for the City of Dallas and delivers world-class health care services through UT Southwestern, Children’s, and Parkland hospital systems. While each hospital maintains neatly landscaped properties, once the private space meets the highway corridors, there is no continuity. More alarming, there is little in the concrete grey environment that promotes safe transit or a place for healing. Texas Trees Foundation, in partnership with the Southwestern Medical District Board, the City of Dallas, the North Central Texas Council of Governments, and the TX Department of Transportation has created a bold new vision for the District that ties together green infrastructure, mobility, and creative placemaking. This grant will support the construction design and community engagement phase. |
| Zan Wesley Holmes Community Outreach CenterFrazier House: Workforce Solutions for the Formerly Incarcerated |
$20,000
Education, |
The unemployment rate among formerly incarcerated people is nearly 5 times higher than the unemployment rate for the general public. Putting people with criminal records on the ladder to economic security is a difficult task that requires carefully selecting occupations, working collaboratively with employers and probation officers, and providing wraparound services that support retention. Frazier House is developing a model that will do just that. This discovery grant will help build out the coaching component. |
| 2020 Census Texas Counts Pooled Fund
Completing the Count: Texas Pooled Fund |
$250,000
Education, |
The 2020 Census officially launches in 7 months. By many measures, Texas, the nation’s second most populous state, is not prepared to achieve a complete count. Inaccurate population data makes planning more difficult, and limits needed federal revenue in many areas, including education and health. To catch up to other states in operational readiness and marketing, two funds have been established at CFT to aggregate resources for efficient and strategic allocation in the City of Dallas and across the state. This grant will be split across the funds. |
In addition to the grants detailed above, CFT’s Caurth Fund awarded $6.3 million in grant awards earlier this year. Read about these grants here.
About Communities Foundation of Texas
With the goal of building thriving communities for all, Communities Foundation of Texas (CFT) works with many individuals, families, companies and nonprofits through a variety of charitable funds and strategic grantmaking initiatives. In 1974, W.W. Caruth, Jr. established his fund as part of the Communities Foundation of Texas with philanthropic goals to support frontier-advancing projects in education, scientific research, medical advancement and public safety. Like it does for the Caruth family, CFT professionally manages more than 1,000 charitable funds and has awarded more than $1.8 billion in grants since its founding in 1953. CFT is committed to serving and understanding donor needs, expertly handling complex gifts, wisely managing charitable funds and leveraging its community knowledge to increase charitable impact.
Learn more: www.cftexas.org @GiveWisely #CFTImpact
