Black Hills Reads is now accepting “Innovation Grant” applications from non-profit organizations, schools, and government agencies who have ideas for innovative projects to help promote early literacy.
Donor Name: United Way of the Black Hills
State: South Dakota
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 04/15/2024
Size of the Grant: $1000 to $10,000
Grant Duration: Grant Duration Not Mentioned
Details:
Black Hills Reads (BHR) is the United Way of the Black Hills’s education initiative, which helps ensure children are proficient readers by the end of third grade.
They are looking for entities to share with innovative approaches that incorporate one or more of five pillar areas:
School Readiness
- The first five years of a child’s life are a time of enormous social, emotional, physical and intellectual growth. Nearly half of the children in community are not prepared for kindergarten. The goal is to close the school readiness gap and to help families gain the tools necessary to achieve the greatest success in preparing their children for kindergarten. Together, with community partners, United Way of the Black Hills is working to ensure children enter school ready to learn, improve early reading proficiency, increase attendance, and raise graduation rates.
Healthy Readers
- Poor health leads to higher rates of developmental delays and disabilities related to learning which causes decreased school readiness. Higher rates of asthma can affect school attendance. Poor nutrition affects learning although there are multiple summer food program sites in community. These missed opportunities can contribute to summer learning loss. These health disparities – differences in health that favor children from more advantaged families – are reflected in lower levels of reading proficiency for children from low-income families.
- The Healthy Readers Initiative of Black Hills Reads focuses on strategies to ensure that children from low-income families are in good health and developing on track in their development from birth through third grade.
Parent Engagement
- Parents play the most powerful and influential role in his or her child’s life. They are the child’s first teacher, brain builder, tech navigator, advocate, and coach. Parents set the stage for success in the early years and early grades. Parents can best prepare children for school, establish good school attendance habits, and prevent summer learning loss. Black Hills Reads recognizes that parents are the secret ingredient!
School Attendance
- Chronic absence is a measure of how much school a student misses for any reason. It is a broader measure than truancy, which only tracks unexcused absences. Starting in the early grades, the percentage of students missing 10 percent of the school year can reach remarkably high levels, and these early absences can rob students of the time they need to develop literacy skills.
- Summer Learning
According to the National Campaign for Grade-Level Reading Initiative, research spanning 100 years has proven that students lose ground academically when they are out of school for the summer. This problem is particularly severe among low-income students who lose an average of more than two months in reading achievement in the summer. This slows their progress toward third grade reading proficiency. In addition, it exacerbates the achievement gap with their middle-class peers. By the end of 5th grade, they are nearly three grade levels behind their peers.
Funding Information
Grant awards up to $5,000.
Criteria
United way highly encourages the collaboration of programs to allow entities to support each other in their efforts to help children prosper. This grant is open to all Black Hills communities.
For more information, visit United Way of the Black Hills.
