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ELKINS – Goodwill of Southwestern Pennsylvania presented major grants to nonprofit organizations in Randolph and Upshur counties this week.
The recipients were the Randolph County Family Resource Network and Feed My Sheep, which is a nonprofit organization in Buckhannon that provides families in need with food and other essential supplies.
The grants are part of Goodwill’s “Best Kept Secret” initiative.
The Randolph County FRN, which connects community members with local agencies to provide basic everyday needs, promote child and family well-being, and support drug and poverty prevention, received $20,000, while Feed My Sheep was granted $25,000.
“This initiative is something new and this is the first time that we have done it,” Lauren Brown, Vice President of External Relations for Goodwill SWPA, told The Inter-Mountain.
“We serve eight counties in Pennsylvania and nine counties in North-Central West Virginia. But a lot of our human services programming wasn’t reaching folks in West Virginia the way that it was in Pittsburgh, so we decided to launch a grant program to help support organizations in North-Central West Virginia that were already doing great work.”
Brown said all of the funding for the grants came from Goodwill’s retail operations.
“We gave away $155,000 total in five grants,” she noted. “We gave away three micro grants and two larger grants that were $50,000. But all of the money that we gave away is money that was generated through our retail operations. So it was revenue that came through our retail stores and we reinvested that money back into North-Central West Virginia.”
Brown said Goodwill of Southwestern Pennsylvania will be doing a second round of grants to North-Central West Virginia in September.
“These grants are by invitation only, so we plan to invite some of the folks who applied the first time around again,” she said. “The last couple of days we spent in North-Central West Virginia delivering the giant checks, we got to know those organizations better and also their partner organizations, which will allow us to expand the list of folks we invite to apply for these grants. We plan to keep doing this for the foreseeable future, probably twice a year.”
For more information about Goodwill of Southwestern Pennsylvania, visit the organization’s Facebook page or go to www.goodwillswpa.org.