FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 21, 2022
WoodsonCenter@Pinkston.co
Woodson Center Awards More than $500,000 in Grants to More than 90 Groups Nationwide
Woodson Center Community Affiliates Network will provide grants to local grassroots leaders solving America’s most pressing problems in their own communities.
WASHINGTON, DC – For the third year in a row, the Woodson Center has awarded more than $500,000 in grants to more than 90 community groups across the country.
These mini-grants are awarded in the amounts of $5,000 and $10,000 through the Center’s Community Affiliates Network (CAN). The network supports local grassroots organizations and social entrepreneurs who are lifting up their own communities and helping provide solutions to unemployment, crime, poverty, lack of quality education, and more.
“These heroes are transforming their neighborhoods, and we are honored to provide whatever support we can to enhance their mission,” said Bob Woodson, Founder and President of the Woodson Center. “We seem to hear all about crime, poverty, and poor education these days, but not so much about what’s being done to fix the problems. Well, the solutions are right there in front of us, if we bother to look – it’s the men and women who are already living success stories. We at the Woodson Center are proud to come alongside them.”
“The Woodson Center mini-grant was able to provide us with the resources to reach more at-risk youth through our program, Garden Tools Not Guns, which is healing the behavior and mentality of young adults, who once participated in selling drugs and other fraudulent activity,” said Pastor Cheryl Gaines, founder of EDEN and one of the grant recipients. “We are bringing tangible solutions, that are economically and morally empowering our youth to realize they have the capacity to change their lives.”
“Our communities are at their best when we work together to solve problems, not promote ideologies of grievance and victimhood,” said Bob Woodson. “For issues of gang violence, drugs, unemployment and poor education, we don’t need top-down interventions that so often enrich the elites in charge; we need to be supporting change from within these troubled communities. These grants will help do just that.”
Some of the awardees for 2022 include Gary Wyatt, CEO and Founder of He Brought Us Out Ministry in Akron, Ohio; Pastor Cheryl Gaines, Senior Pastor at ReGeneration House of Praise and Founder of Project EDEN in Washington, D.C.; and Teresa Merriweather, Trafficked Lives Matter Hand-N-Hand in Elyria, Ohio.
Gary Wyatt founded He Brought Us Out Ministry in 2001 to provide faith-based and educational services to communities in Akron, such as a food pantry, afterschool programs, and youth mentoring. His ministry primarily serves immigrants and refugees as well as Hispanic, African-American, and Caucasian inner-city communities in the Akron area. He overcame his own history of drug dealing and drug abuse and turned his own life around, founding the ministry in an effort to help others transform their lives as well.
A CAN affiliate since 1998, Wyatt plans to use the 2022 seed money for his ministry’s programs that serve 500 Families, and is hoping to relaunch the Woodson Center’s Violence Free Zone in his community.
Pastor Cheryl Gaines founded Project EDEN (Everyone Deserves to Eat Naturally), providing healthy food education and transitional employment to at-risk youth and
formerly-incarcerated adults in southeast Washington, D.C. She teaches participants to grow their own food in urban gardens and also how to bring produce to market. With the seed money, Pastor Gaines will pay two young adults in her program a $15-an-hour stipend, employing one of them full time and giving them professional education and opportunities.
Teresa Merriweather, a second-year mini-grant recipient, is the founder of Trafficked
Lives Matter Hand-N-Hand, in Elyria, Ohio. A survivor of human trafficking, Teresa provides human trafficking awareness education and training to youth and adults who primarily live in low-income communities. In five years, she has trained thousands of people including police officers, behavioral specialists, cosmetologists, and schools in using a screening tool to detect victims of trafficking. She will use the mini-grant to provide training to low-income communities and college students.
The Woodson Center’s Community Affiliates Network consists of hundreds of organizations and nonprofits across the country that collaborate, share best practices, and support each other as community-minded grassroots leaders. The network includes trusted local leaders who are a central part of the community and actually live in the neighborhoods they serve. While many federal and state programs “parachute in” solutions without any local knowledge, CAN supports those already solving issues effectively and helps them achieve much better results than top-down planning can produce.
About The Woodson Center:
Led by former civil rights activist Bob Woodson, the Woodson Center has worked for three decades to empower indigenous leaders in troubled neighborhoods to address problems of their communities through innovative initiatives that increase public safety, spur upward mobility, and inspire racial unity in America. Learn more at www.WoodsonCenter.org