Grant Recipients 2023

$45,000 Impact Grant
Learning Home Volunteers partners with low-income families in San Mateo County to help every 2 to 5 year-old child get an equal start at school by improving their kindergarten readiness – the #1 predictor of academic success. Their comprehensive program empowers, equips, and connects low-income parents to foster engaging, creative, and educational play-based learning with their young children. Working with 2 paid staff and a volunteer network of over 500, they provide monthly learning materials that are adapted and customized for each child’s interests and needs, and comprehensive parent training and support to empower the parents to become educational advocates for their children. For the past 3 years, every child who has completed the program has been assessed as ‘kindergarten ready’ with many demonstrating ‘first-grade’ readiness, while most low-income children have entered kindergarten 18 – 24 months behind – a learning gap that persists and typically deepens over time. Learning Home Volunteers has developed a successful model of leveraging volunteers to help low-income parents provide the educational foundation to help their young children succeed in school.
GRANT IMPACT
A grant from 100 Women would provide the wrap-around support for an additional 50 local low-income children ensuring that they are not only kindergarten ready but are at parity with their more affluent peers. We will empower and equip their parents to act as their child’s teacher and prepare the parents to be advocates for their child in the school system and wherever else is needed. We have a wait list of 82 families that we cannot serve due to limited resources

$45,000 Impact Grant
CASSY (Counseling and Support Services for Youth) is a beacon of hope for our youth suffering from mental health concerns. Intensified by COVID, more than 20% of young individuals face mental health concerns, with up to 70% lacking the necessary support. CASSY takes the fight to the front lines, providing free professional mental health assistance to over 9,000 students annually on local school campuses.
CASSY was created in 2009, and is dedicated to breaking the stigma surrounding mental health and ensuring that no one faces these challenges alone. Being school-based is key. Through their passionate
team of highly qualified therapists, CASSY provides on-campus access to students to engage in vital conversations in a familiar safe environment. This eliminates the most common barriers to mental health treatment: cost, lack of transportation, wait lists, and the cultural stigma of having mental health issues. In the 2022-23 school year, they provided mental health assistance to over 9,000 students through personalized counseling sessions, group activities, and community outreach programs.
GRANT IMPACT
A grant from 100 Women will help fund CASSY’s expansion in their newest partnership with the Santa Clara School District. This grant will help fund 4 therapists supporting four of their schools: Cabrillo Middle School, Don Callejon K-8, Santa Clara High School, and Wilcox High School with a target goal of serving 200 students.

$45,000 Impact Grant
Friends for Youth serves as a lifeline for our often-overlooked youth, with a staggering 30% of at-risk youth navigating turbulent waters alone. Friends for Youth supports youth facing abuse, deep poverty, incarcerated parents, or just not having a trusted adult to talk to, by matching them with caring adult mentors.They believe “Mentors Change Lives.” Friends for Youth delivers both individual and group mentorship programs. They are successful because the mentors themselves are expertly trained and have their own similar lived experiences, creating genuine empathy and support. These individuals have witnessed firsthand the transformative power of mentorship, with 80% reporting positive changes in their lives,and are driven to make a difference with others. Friends for Youth has matched over 3,000 youth with a mentor since their inception in 1979.Their 90% success rate of creating long-term mentoring matches is far above the 35% national average and a testament to their nationally recognized, evidence-based matching program.

GRANT IMPACT Schools and sites continue to contact Friends for Youth to fulfill a need for mentoring and social-emotional learning and support. This funding request is for the expansion of 1-to-1 and group mentoring services into four more schools within the Redwood City School District and San Mateo Foster City School District and two community partner sites, Life Moves in Menlo Park and EPATT in East Palo Alto, serving an estimated 60 new students.

$14,500 Investment Grant
Live in Peace has been an integral part of the East Palo Alto community for over two decades and is driven by a simple yet powerful principle: we are family! Their mission is to empower teens and young adults by connecting them to their talents, educational pathways, and a promising future. This is done with a multi-faceted approach that includes tutoring, one-on-one mentoring, goal monitoring, access to mental health counseling, and peer and social-emotional support.
They facilitate opportunities for youth to tap into their personal power by organizing experiences that aim to spark interest and uncover talents. This includes connecting them with experts in desired career fields, arranging trips to potential colleges and trade programs, and offering resources for coaching and developing specific talents. They also have developed a SWAG (Students Who Achieve Greatness) program to focus on the most academically disengaged students in grades 9-12 and those most at risk for not graduating from high school. It provides tutoring, one-on-one mentoring support, case management, security, stability, and more to see these students get back on track to graduate.
GRANT IMPACT
A grant from 100 Women will help them make their SWAG program stronger and enable more students to participate in the program. It costs approximately $3,025 for a young adult to be in their SWAG program. The best way to fight system racism, poverty, and generational curses is to arm yourself with education and a vision for your life and the SWAG high school program does that for their youth.

$14,500 Investment Grant
In 1958, a group of lawyers and community leaders recognized an unmet need to help the low-income residents of San Mateo County resolve their legal problems, and the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County was born. Since then, the Legal Society of San Mateo County has grown to become one of the most respected public interest law firms in California. They are an integral part of San Mateo County’s safety net and have a history of successfully collaborating with community agencies, local governments, health care providers, and pro bono attorneys to provide coordinated services to low-income families, seniors, and individuals with disabilities residing in San Mateo County.
One of the Legal Aid Society’s initiatives is the Peninsula Family Advocacy Program (FAP), an established, ongoing program that uses legal tools and strategies to help low-income families. Most of their cases focus on securing appropriate special education support and services for children with disabilities. FAP is the only organization in San Mateo County that offers free legal services specifically targeted to assist low-income children with disabilities and their families in receiving these services.

GRANT IMPACT
A grant from 100 Women would help the Legal Aid Society’s Peninsula Family Advocacy Program (FAP) secure services for 100 low-income families with children with disabilities in San Mateo County. These services would include direct representation and advocacy on behalf of these families to receive the following: access to special education services in schools, access to early intervention services, to secure economic benefits through the social safety net, and access to health care services.

$14,500 Investment Grant
Loved Twice was started in 2005 in response to Hurricane Katrina. While mailing off collected onesies, swaddling blankets, and other donated newborn clothes to Louisiana, the founder of Loved Twice realized that the same simple process of reusing gently used baby clothing for infants in need could be applied in her home state of California. She founded Loved Twice to help underprivileged newborns in our community get a better start in life.
Today, Loved Twice has grown into an effective grassroots nonprofit that is embraced by the communities it serves. Since its inception in 2005, Loved Twice has provided 32,575 newborns a full year’s worth of baby clothes, distributed via a network of over 150 hospitals, clinics, shelters, and safe houses in the nine counties of the Bay Area. Loved Twice is mission focused and does just one thing: collecting gently used baby clothes and providing a year’s worth of clothing for at-risk newborns.

GRANT IMPACT
A grant from 100 Women would provide 600 infants in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties a “wardrobe-in-a-box” filled with clothes for their first year of life. The boxes would be packed with over 75 articles of clothing in multiple sizes (onesies, pants, socks, hats, bibs, plus a warm blanket and a board book). The boxes would be distributed to agencies and social workers, who would then distribute those boxes to babies in need.