Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 80 OCTOBER 2020 I N - D E P T H A flight of beer at Granite Coast. Robyn Frost, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless in Lynn, remembers the great conversation she had just before the pandemic with people from The Women's Fund of Essex County, an all-volunteer organization that provides funding to nonprofit programs to improve the lives of women and girls in Essex County. The Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless was seeking a grant to expand its STEAM to Build DREAMS initiative, where local students design and build beds for children in poverty. "We gave them this beautiful presentation," Frost says of the Coalition's meeting with The Women's Fund. "Then COVID hit." Suddenly, the bed-building program was The Women's Fund of Essex County offers COV ID-19 relief grants. BY ALEX ANDRA PECCI GIVING GRANTS PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHUTTERSTOCK, BY ISTOCK (TOP RIGHT) shoved to the back burner as emergency needs bubbled to the surface. Not only were its clients in crisis, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless wondered how it would continue to function at all. "Most of us had funding sources that literally dried up, but the need had escalated," Frost says of her own organization and other local nonprofits. What happened next was a lifesaver, literally: Instead of scrapping its planned grants for programs that had ground to a halt because of the pandemic, The Women's Fund quickly shifted its giving strategy to allow for COVID-19 relief. In the grant-giving and nonprofit world, grants are awarded for specific programs. When agencies receive grants, they're not allowed to use that money for anything else. But during the pandemic, many agencies shut down, closing their facilities and in-person programs, and leaving funding that was earmarked for those programs essentially useless. "We recognized that we had to immediately change direction and use a completely different playbook," says Lisa W. Parker, grants allocation chair for The Women's Fund of Essex County. "Because it really was sort of silly for us to try to fund programs when it was clear that our grantees weren't thinking programs, they were thinking survival." Instead of giving its usual three-year, program-specific grants, The Women's Fund awarded one-year unrestricted grants that would allow agencies to use the money in any way they needed to during the pandemic, giving away $100,000 to 12 agencies. It was a move "that doesn't happen very often in the funding world," Frost says, calling the grant money from The Women's Fund "a shot in the arm that allowed us to continue to do very impactful work." The Women's Fund of Essex County is an all-volunteer organization that provides funding to nonprofit programs to improve the lives of women and girls in Essex County.