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Essex County Resilient Girls Project

The Essex County Resilient Girls Project, an initiative of The Women’s Fund of Essex County supported by the Cummings Foundation, will invest in a small three-year cohort of nonprofit programs that help adolescent girls (ages 11 to 18) to build and strengthen personal resilience. Grants will be made to enhance existing programs in a measurable way or to fund creative new initiatives.

The Project has three main components: 1) A total of five, three-year grants will be awarded to focus on building and enhancing resilience in adolescent girls. 2) The five grantees will become a cohort-based learning initiative, convening two times each year over the three years of funding to share their approaches, successes, and challenges and learn from other thought leaders in the field to support their work around building girls’ resiliency; 3) The integration of an evaluation and research model based on the 7Cs Model of Positive Development (Ginsburg & Jablow, 2015) with the goal of assessing in what ways programs can positively influence girls’ development of the 7Cs. The 7Cs include seven qualities that research has tied to resilience: competence, confidence, character, connection, contribution, coping, and control.

2023 Grants

The Women’s Fund of Essex County is offering five 3-year grants of $14,000 per year over 3 years ($42,000 total over 3 years)

Grant Guidelines

eligibility

The Women’s Fund is limited to non-sectarian programming for Essex County girls of all religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Programs sponsored by religious organizations are eligible if enrolment is open to all qualified adolescent girls and the program is free of mandatory sectarian religious instruction.

Generally, grants will not be awarded:

To individuals
To agencies with pending 501(c)3 status
For debt or deficit reduction
For political purposes
For sectarian or religious purposes
For endowment or capital campaigns
For research or feasibility studies

application deadline

Applications must be received no later than 11:59pm on September 14, 2023. Incomplete or late applications will not be considered.

application procedure

Organizations considering applying are invited to schedule a 20-minute information session with a member of our Grants Committee and our ECCF staff liaison, Corinne Lippie. The purpose of these sessions is to answer questions and allow potential applicants to get a better understanding of the Project overall. The information sessions are not mandatory and participation in them will not be factored into grant decisions. If you would like to schedule one, please email Corinne at c.lippie@eccf.org.

The application is completely electronic. Organizations can create and save application drafts and make changes any time prior to submission. We archive all submitted applications, allowing grant writers to view their grant history with The Women’s Fund at any time.

review process

A special Grants Committee of The Women’s Fund will carefully review applications and schedule any necessary follow-up conference calls or in-person site visits with qualifying applicants as part of the application review process.

The Committee will then make grant decisions and present their recommendations for final approval by The Women’s Fund Advisory Board and by the Essex County Community Foundation Board of Trustees.
Grant Awards will be announced by December 1, 2023.

other requirements

Grantees will be required to participate in two cohort meetings per year as well as to implement the Project’s evaluation tools to assess program effectiveness on developing resilience in adolescent girls. The evaluation protocol and tools will be provided by The Women’s Fund in collaboration with the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.

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APPLICATION PORTAL

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APPLICATION DEADLINE

September 14, 2023

GRANTS NOTIFICATION

December 1, 2023

GRANTS

$14,000/year for 3 years

GEOGRAPHIC LIMITATIONS

We support non-profit organizations serving the residents of Essex County, MA. We prefer the organization be based in Essex County, but it is not a requirement. Either way, the grant funds must be spent within the County.

FINAL REPORT FORMS

Final reports should be submitted through the Application Portal.

RECENT GRANTS