2019 Power of Youth Challenge Grant Recipient
Leaders in Lowell is excited to announce that we have been awarded the "Power of Youth Challange Accelerator Grant" from America's Promise Alliance, the C.S. Mott Foundation, and Peace First. This grant will change the way we run our series and we are so grateful for their support! Earlier this year we applied for the Power of Youth Challange and received a $250 grant which helped fund our event with Holocaust survivor Rena Finder. After this event, we became finalists for a $1,000 Accelerator Grant to fund our program. The funds from this grant will support our Civic Engagement series of events from December 2019 to May 2020.
About the Power of Youth Challange:
From America's Promise Alliance
Last year, America’s Promise Alliance launched the Power of Youth Challenge to encourage and inspire youth-led service projects around the country.
In partnership with Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Peace First, we posed a challenge to young people to identify an issue or an injustice in their community and put forth an idea that engages others to make an impact. To deepen their knowledge and insights about a problem their community face and put forth a solution, we gave them $250 to help make it happen.
The response was immediate. Five hundred teams of young people from all across the country raised their hands to accept the challenge. They came from 42 states, as well as urban areas, small towns and big cities. In the six months they had to complete the process from insight to planning to action to reflections, 25,000 young people engaged in 86 projects and did the deep work to make their communities a better place to live and thrive. Additionally, 235,000 people engaged in the Challenge by social media, spreading the word, promoting the projects and the causes.
Out of these 86 applicants, ten were selected to accelerate their progress with an additional $1,000 grant. These were chosen by a team of youth leaders at Peace First. They looked for their peers who had deepened their understanding of the root causes of the problem, demonstrated perseverance, compassion, and understanding for others’ perspectives and were having a significant impact for and with the people who were affected by the community issue they chose to tackle. These finalists will receive an $1,000 accelerator grant to continue their work on their service project.
From assisting young people in expanding their worldview by creating a digital exchange to providing information about healthy ways of managing stress and pain for high school students, the projects touch on a number of issues that affect Americans from coast to coast.
This challenge was made possible by a generous grant of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which supports projects around the world that promote a just, equitable and sustainable society and believes that young people themselves are the key to solving some of our communities’ most pressing problems.
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