Grantees

Produce a film based on the acclaimed Voices Project theater production that toured Vermont in 2007. The film will be based on the lives of Vermont teens.

The Waitsfield Children’s Center provides a play based curriculum that is developmentally stimulating, and provide endless hands-on learning opportunities. We are a non-profit licensed center based childcare program, providing daily care for children age’s birth through preschool. Regularly incorporate nature, art, music, movement, science, early math, pre-reading, and pre-writing skills into our play based activities. We are creating a mud kitchen on our playground, incorporating it to our new gardens, providing an opportunity for children to develop their fine motor skills outside, in an area that is often focused on gross motor skills.

TAP is a theatre arts program that serves 40 youth and adults with cognitive, social and physical disabilities along with 4-5 non-disabled peers. Year-round theatre skill-based activities enhance communications, self-expression and self-esteem.

Offers theatre-based activities specifically designed to allow youth with cognitive and physical disabilites the opportunity for self expression. The unique "reverse mainstream" model insures the students with disabilities the chance to dictate the pace and create a dominate atmosphere of inclusion.

Provide therapeutic child care option and parent education opportunities that support the healthy social and emotional development of chldren

Reinbow Riding Center has been providing therapeutic horsemanship lessons to individuals and groups of children age 3 to teenagers from schools, military families, and referrals for over 15 years. It is a safety requirement that during those lessons all participants must wear safety helmets while at the Center and especially while working with the horses, a focal point of their lessons, and often the key to opening their hearts and minds to new experiences, learning, attitudes and behaviors. Each helmet has an expiration date on its effectiveness. At the end of each year, Reinbow personnel checks the inventory and discards those that have reached that expiration. While we generally rotate them on a regular basis so there are only a few that expire each year, following Covid, our program was in great demand by local schools and we had to buy quite a few more helmets to accommodate the increase of participants. Those helmets reached their expiration date at the end of 2024.

A book and curriculum created by AWARE for use in teir vioilence prevention programs. The purpose is to encourage critical viewing, especially around themes of violence, bullying and stereotypes.

Thrive is a childcare/enrichment program serving the diverse, close-knit, and resilient community of Winooski. We support children in grades K-5 to develop their literacy, STEM, and socioemotional skills during after school and summer time. We plan to create a Makerspace to enhance the engineering and tinkering options we provide to kids, promoting youth resilience. Using an iterative process to solve problems and persist through failure will help our students overcome challenges in other areas of their lives. Students will collaborate, imagine, and problem-solve while building cars and structures, coding and programming robots, and exploring with a 3-D printer.