By JOE MURCHISON
The city of Laurel and allied nonprofits are hoping to use a state grant to seed an effort aimed at reducing local child poverty.
City officials discussed their vision on March 27 at an event celebrating their winning a $65,000 grant through the state’s ENOUGH Initiative. The grant will enable them to do a six-month study of challenges faced by low-income families in the Deerfield Run Elementary School attendance area in South Laurel.
The state created the $20 million ENOUGH grant program last year to help identify local solutions to the root causes of child poverty. ENOUGH stands for Engaging Neighborhoods, Organizations, Unions, Governments and Households.
The city of Laurel and local nonprofits hope the research funded by the first grant will lead to a second ENOUGH grant proposal to implement an anti-poverty program based on the research. The second proposal would seek an additional $300,000.
Sandra Price, programs operations manager for the city’s Craig A. Moe Multiservice Center, wrote the successful first grant application. She said the money will pay for a series of focus group sessions with Deerfield Run families. “We’re not going to tell them what they need; they are going to tell us what they need,” she said. Providing a meal and childcare at the sessions will enable more parents to participate, she added.
Price wrote the grant on behalf of Laurel Multiservice Center Inc., a nonprofit through which the city and local charities collaborate to provide services to the needy. While the Deerfield Run neighborhood is outside the city of Laurel proper, the school was chosen because more than 80% of its families are considered low-income, which is a grant requirement under the ENOUGH Initiative, Price explained.
Courtesy of Alaysia Ezzard
She said, “We want the parents not just to come to focus groups; we want them to be leaders at the table.”
Price said an intern will be hired through the University of Maryland School of Social Work to coordinate the research, and an educational consultant will be hired to lead the focus groups.
The grant money will pay for computers for families who lack them and some special programs, Price said, including financial literacy activities for children and art therapy for families suffering trauma. “People who live in poverty live in trauma,” she noted, adding that the therapy sessions could help uncover deeper issues that keep families locked in poverty.
