Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Second Round of Grant Winners Announced!

The SCRA Community Mini-Grant, sponsored for this first time this year, is a time-sensitive grant designed to be responsive to community needs.  


Our second two awardees were announced this year.  You can read about their projects below - we are very excited to sponsor them, and look forward to hearing about their work as it progresses.  


SCRA plans to offer ten grants, with an average award of $1,200.  All current SCRA members and their community collaborators are welcome to apply. For more information on this grant, please see http://www.scra27.org/practice or email SCRACommunityGrants [at] gmail.com.

 Grant Number 3:  SCRA Member - Annie Wright
Student-led Historical Preservation in Columbia, SC
       The Historic Columbia Foundation is partnering with the Richland County School District One to provide students a unique hands-on learning experience.  Students are driving a preservation project at the Mann-Simons historic house museum.  In the Spring of 2011, students in a Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) course at the Heyward Career and Technology Education center engaged in an in-depth and on-site study of the site.  Based on evidence they helped gather, these students generated CAD drawings of structures that formerly stood on the site.  They have now passed those drawings on to their colleagues in a Residential Construction course who have begun their own investigation of the site.  With funding from the SCRA Mini Grants award to purchase building supplies, and in collaboration with HCF historians and archaeologists,  these students will build "ghost structures" or frames of buildings that previously stood on the property.  The project aims to expose students to a counter-narrative about an empowered African American family from South Carolina and to actively engage them in the physical preservation of the site.  Additionally, the project aims to develop a model for school-community partnerships where historical preservation projects can catalyze community engagement and social change around persistent racial divides.

Grant Number 4:  SCRA Member - Dawn Henderson
A Mixed Methods Project of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA’s Boomerang Program: From theory to evaluation
         The aim of this project is to conduct a collaborative evaluation to assess the relationship between youth participation in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA’s Alternative to Suspension Boomerang Program, resilience and connectedness, and ways in which these services affect relationships at the parent and teacher level (family and school level).  Over the past year, the researcher has met with Boomerang staff to identify their evaluation and program needs, target population, description of program, and identify relevant stakeholders and outcomes. Boomerang staff are actively engaged throughout each stage of the project, which includes the formation of a program theory, evaluation plan, and assisting in data collection. Findings from the project has implications not just for Boomerang but also to glean how their particular services translate into the relationships that students have beyond the context of the program and into the school and family setting. Thus, possibly shedding light on the behavior of youth when leaving the Boomerang Program and ways in which these settings factor in on sustaining intervention efforts. Incentives for program participants, teachers and parents and data analysis are funded through the generous support from the SCRA Community Mini-Grant.

No comments:

Post a Comment