Grant Award 2009:

2009 Grant Recipients:
On June 11, 2009 Impact members attended the Annual Awards Celebration to hear presentations and to vote to determine the recipient of their $100,000 grant - Outreach, Inc. The four other nonprofit finalists each received $16,000 in unrestricted funds. These finalists were Indianapolis Opera, Fathers and Families, Improving Kids Environment, Inc., and Trusted Mentors.

Outreach, Inc - Project G.O.A.L.

In 2003, the Indiana Department of Education approached Outreach, Inc. about starting a program to work with the homeless student population in the Indianapolis Public School system. These youth were moving from house to house, or on the streets with no stability and little or no parental involvement. They were youth who, without an outside support system, were dropping out of high school at an alarming rate. Project G.O.A.L. (graduation, occupation, address, lifestyle) was created. The G.O.A.L. program is designed to meet the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter of unaccompanied youth enrolled in local high schools; to provide job skills training; to provide post-secondary educational opportunities; and to provide meaningful mentoring relationships.

Working together with school counselors, and administrators Outreach has been able to increase the graduation rate of homeless students who become involved in the G.O.A.L. program from 25% to well over 65%, and of those graduates an average 50% continue on to college, or vocational school. The Impact 100 grant will allow Outreach to double program enrollment, add staff members and help expand the mentor corps and its costs.

Grant Award 2008:

2008 Grant Recipients:
On Thursday, June 12, 2008 Impact members attended the Annual Awards Celebration to hear presentations and to vote to determine the two recipients of their $104,000 grants. Each of the two finalists will receive $104,000 supporting their proposed programs highlighted below:

Herron High School - Arts Equipment for Education Excellence

Herron High School is a public Charter School located in downtown Indianapolis providing a classical liberal arts, college preparatory education that integrates the arts into their entire curriculum. Herron High School students had the highest Language Arts scores in Marion County on this year's ISTEP+ test. The proposed new project request for arts equipment (performing as well as visual) will enable Herron HS to foster student's latent academic potential and cultivate their passion for the arts; thus, creating the next generation of civic leaders.

Horizon House – Engagement Team Project

Horizon House serves as Indianapolis' only multi-service day center serving the homeless of Central Indiana by providing comprehensive services to homeless individuals, including: day shelter, mail-pick-up, showers, laundry, long-term storage, employment training, case management, mental health and addictions counseling, medical care, legal counseling and referrals to local partnering agencies. Horizon House’s program is designed to restructure their operations to implement a new Engagement Team approach to serve the homeless more effectively and to better align their services with the Indianapolis Blueprint to End Homelessness. The Engagement Team Project would utilize a collaborative, specialized team approach that would give the homeless access to a greater number of services in a more timely manner, thus reducing the length of time they are homeless and increasing their chances for long term success.

2008 Focus Area Finalists:
From January through May volunteer members of the five focus areas read and evaluated over 100 nonprofit proposals received by Impact 100 Greater Indianapolis. Our Committees celebrated the accomplishment of the following other 2008 finalists:

» Arts and Culture
Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) - Connecting Everyday + Art
Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art brings contemporary exhibitions and programs in a wide array of mediums to the community. The Connecting Everyday + Art proposal would provide funding for key areas: 1. produce and distribute COLOR NOW activity/coloring books to 20,500 elementary students and 10,000 hospitalized children; 2. a collaborative project with Indianapolis/Marion County Library and Indianapolis Opera to present literary, theatrical and artistic interpretations of Hansel and Gretel at the library for elementary age children; 3. showcase emerging and cutting edge artists with an emphasis on women and minorities and 4. iMOCA editions, an on-line and in-house store selling affordable limited editions of contemporary art that would help the museum become self-sustaining.

» Environment
Hoosier Heartland Resource Conservation & Development Council, Inc. - Every Tree Counts
Hoosier Heartland seeks to plant 5,500 native hardwood trees, and install eight demonstrative rain gardens in Marion and surrounding counties through their program Every Tree Counts. The benefits of a greener environment will be shared as both the trees and rain gardens are installed to educate local residents and school-age children. Trees improve the health of the landscape and the health of people by taking in carbon dioxide emissions and giving off oxygen. Rain gardens clean up and manage the ever-increasing amount of storm water entering our drainage systems.

» Family
Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic - Helping Hoosier Homeowners
Every time a home goes into foreclosure, the impact is felt in the entire neighborhood by slashing nearby property values and neighborhood safety, and uprooting of a family from its community and schools. The Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic's (NCLC) Helping Hoosier Homeowners project focuses on one of the central crises facing the poor in central Indiana: the risk of losing family homes due to foreclosure. NCLC's paid and volunteer lawyers and housing counselors will work with central Indiana families to prevent foreclosure and save Hoosier homes, through both crisis response and prevention strategies. This program will allow NCLC to accept up to 600 more foreclosure cases and counsel 600 families in the coming year.

Grant Award 2007:

2007 Grant Recipients:
On Tuesday, June 12, 2007 Impact members attended the Annual meeting to hear presentations and vote to determine the two recipients of their $102,500 grants. Each of the two finalists will receive $102,500 supporting their proposed programs highlighted below:

Indy Reads--Volunteer Tutor Training Program Expansion

Indy Reads, the only provider of free basic literacy tutoring to adults in Indianapolis, seeks to expand current volunteer training for tutors to reach more students. The proposal requests funds for the program manager position, for contracted certified trainers, to print tutoring materials, to underwrite pro-rated office expenses to Indianapolis Marion County Public Library, to fund travel to a ProLiteracy Conference, and to purchase training software. Indy Reads is currently undergoing a significant organizational change, operating as an independent nonprofit for the first time in its twenty-two year history.

John P. Craine House/Fairbanks Collaboration--The Next Generation at Risk

This new and innovative partnership between Craine House and Fairbanks, "Parenting Education and Interventions for Substance Impacted Mothers and their Children" will address substance abuse issues of incarcerated women and their children. The ultimate goal is to prepare the families for success--both in the present and the future-- while breaking the cycle of substance abuse and incarceration that plagues too many Indianapolis families.

Grant Award 2006:

Wishard Memorial Foundation - Pecar Health Center Pharmacy
On June 27, 2006 Impact 100 Greater Indianapolis had the opportunity to put their "one woman one vote" philosophy into practice for the first time. After months of studying 123 central Indiana nonprofits' grant requests Wishard Memorial Foundation was selected as the group's 2006 grant recipient.

A check totaling $152,000 was awarded to the Wishard Memorial Foundation to fund the Pecar Health Center Pharmacy. The Center is one of nine community-based clinics operated by Wishard Health Services and IU Medical Group-Primary Care that provides a variety of health-related services to predominantly underserved residents in the northwest side of Indianapolis. Last year the facility served over 10,000 patients and has an expected growth of 20 percent in 2006. The goal is for Pecar to be a "medical home" by providing a full array of services, including primary and preventative care, disease screening and control, dental care and mental health services.

Missing from the medical home model was a full-service, on-site outpatient pharmacy. The Impact 100 Greater Indianapolis grant provided the funding to complete construction of the 2,000 square foot facility at Pecar which opened June 30, 2007. The Pecar Pharmacy has the potential to dispense 100,000 prescriptions on site per year. Many of the patients do not have prescription drug coverage and use Wishard Advantage (Wishard Health Services’ managed care program). This type of community based care provides the highest quality and lowest cost care for patients and makes it less likely patients will use the county’s emergency rooms for routine care. The pharmacy will be named for Impact 100 Greater Indianapolis.