COLUMBIA—The Sisters of Charity Foundation of South Carolina recently awarded Caritas grants for the spring 2016 grant cycle. These grants bear the name of one of the guiding principles of the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine, in omnibus caritas, meaning “in all things charity.”
Caritas grants are awarded to organizations meeting basic needs of underserved individuals and families living in poverty in South Carolina. These organizations often act as a lifeline in their communities and provide valuable services to those most in need. In total, 34 organizations were awarded Caritas spring 2016 funding for a total of $69,750, so they may continue providing services to individuals and families in South Carolina. The Foundation is proud to announce their partnerships with the following recipients:
Backpack Buddies Seabrook Island: Funds will provide nutritious food and snacks for the weekend to children at three schools in Charleston County. (Charleston)
Camp Discovery: Funding will support the implementation of a monthly after-school initiative, Outdoor Explore, to promote academic achievement and stewardship for low-income and at-risk youth in Richland County. (Richland)
Camp Happy Days: Funds will support families whose children have been diagnosed with cancer and are struggling financially. When children are hospitalized, families face daily or weekly trips to the hospital for treatment, sometimes hours away. This grant will help provide gas and grocery cards. (South Carolina)
Center for Community Services: Funding will allow the center to integrate its on-site emergency and employment services. In partnership with the Golden Strip Emergency Relief and Resource Agency, the center will offer case management and benefit assistance to those receiving utility and food assistance each day. (Greenville, Laurens)
Charleston Jewish Federation: Funds of $3,000 will help provide financial assistance for medical, housing, and utilities’ needs for under resourced families in the Charleston community. In emergency financial situations, the Jewish federation is often the last lifeline and keeps clients from eviction or foreclosure. It also provides advocacy, case management, and mental health counseling at no out-of-pocket costs to families in need, and provides emergency food assistance through its weekly community Kosher Food Pantry. (Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester)
Children’s Outreach Programs for Education: Funding will help purchase jackets for children whose families cannot afford them. The grant states that new school district policy now requires, in addition to school uniform, certain colors of jackets and sweaters to be worn inside school buildings and many families cannot afford them. (Marion)
Circle of Hope Ministries: This grant will fund Circle of Hope’s operational expenses as they continue to provide services and outreach to the local homeless community in the form of food, clothing, hygiene products and transportation. (Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton, Jasper)
Community Initiatives: Funds will support a practical and sustainable system of diabetes management. The program will help low income patients achieve and maintain blood sugar and blood pressure goals within established treatment guidelines in the service area of Clinica Gratis/Free Clinic of Community Initiatives, Inc. (Greenwood, Abbeville, Edgefield, McCormick, Saluda)
East Cooper Meals on Wheels: Funding will support the provision of healthier meals and foods for health impaired seniors, which allows many of them to remain in their own homes. These residents are on limited fixed incomes and the program eases the fear of hunger or losing their homes. (Charleston, Berkeley)
Edgefield County Youth Empowerment Center: Funds will help impoverished youth and their families experience a better quality of life focusing on economics empowerment, family literacy, and poverty. The program helps families develop and maintain family budgets, prepare for a job search, build soft skills, and build/maintain savings. (Edgefield)
Four Holes Indian Organization Edisto Tribal: Funds will be used to hire a nurse practitioner at this medical clinic and provide funding for administrative support staff time. This additional personnel will allow the organization to expand clinic hours and services from three times a month (36 clinics per year) to three times a week (156 clinics per year). (Berkeley, Charleston, Colleton, Dorchester, Orangeburg)
Friendship Place: Funding will support Georgetown Eats, which serves the residents of Georgetown County six days a week with the intent of feeding individuals living at or below the federal poverty level in Georgetown County. There is no other program in the city of Georgetown that provides a daily hot meal to those in need. (Georgetown)
Grace Ministries: Funding will support the Neighbor to Neighbor program, which connects adults in need with trained volunteers who provide services, such as transportation to medical appointments and other destinations, to promote and maintain independent living. (Horry, Georgetown)
Hands of Christ: Funds will help provide children (pre-K through eighth grade) with two sets of school uniforms, including pants, shirts, underwear, and socks, plus grade-appropriate school supplies. (Berkeley, Charleston, Dorchester, Colleton, Williamsburg)
Help 4 Kids Florence: Funding will help provide children with safe, reliable, healthy food on the weekend, thus filling the weekend hunger gap for children in Florence County. Help 4 Kids is a volunteer group of Florence citizens working to reduce childhood hunger in Florence County public schools. (Florence)
Helping Hand Center: Funding will support seniors and disabled citizens to whom health and safety are a major concern. This program provides home repairs, handicap ramps, steps, guard rails, and other safety issues. The program also offers monthly health monitoring and education, supplement drinks, incontinence supplies, medical and transportation assistance. (Hampton, Jasper)
House of Refuge/Refuge Outreach Ministry: Funds will support the program’s mission to enhance the lives of homeless women and children escaping domestic violence in S.C. by providing shelter, counseling, and other services. (Darlington, Florence, Sumter)
ICNA Relief USA, Shifa Free Clinic: Funding will support the following Shifa Clinic programs: Child Hunger Prevention, which works to fill the gap for weekend meals for children in the free lunch program at school; Adult Food Pantry, available to all Shifa Clinic patients to take monthly supplies of groceries at the time of their visit; and Homeless Food Service, where once a month they serve a freshly cooked hot meal to the homeless. (Charleston, Dorchester, Berkeley)
Jordan Crossroads Ministry Center: Funds will provide support for Haven of Rest, a nonprofit transitional domestic violence crisis center for women and their children escaping their aggressive/abusive partner or spouse. (South Carolina, Clarendon, Sumter, Lee, Williamsburg, Florence)
Lutheran Social Services of the Greater Charleston Area: Funding will support the Emergency Feeding Program, which provides immediate support year-round: families in crisis, single mothers struggling to make ends meet, seniors living on meager fixed incomes, and homeless and displaced individuals. (Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester)
Meals on Wheels Bluffton-Hilton Head: Funds will offer support for the delivery of nourishing mid-day meals to homebound clients regardless of age, race, creed, sex or ability to pay, who would otherwise not receive such a meal. The great majority of clients are elderly, ill, or disabled and are unable to afford the cost of their meals. (Beaufort)
MedNeed of S.C.: Funding will help provide durable medical equipment to the uninsured and indigent throughout South Carolina. The program’s mission is to reach as many of South Carolina’s medically needy as possible. (Richland, Lexington, South Carolina)
Mercy Medicine Clinic: Funding will support a program for low-income, uninsured adults focusing on increased physical activity, weight reduction through healthy food choices, monitoring for pre-diabetes and hypertension, and counseling referrals for financial literacy or mental health as needed. (Florence, Williamsburg)
North Greenville Food Crisis Ministry: Funding will support their food assistance program, which saw an increase of around 12 percent from the previous year and is prepared for continued increases. Also, classes are taught each month on how to eat healthy on a budget, buy foods, cook, and eat for a diabetic, plus how to avoid financial fraud, cope with stress and grief, prevent identity theft, and grow a garden. (Greenville)
North Strand Helping Hand: Funding will support assisting families with utility/rent/prescription costs and food. It also helps the homeless move into stable housing by helping them obtain furniture and household supplies and assisting with packing and transporting possessions and moving in to their new homes. (Horry)
Operation Sight: Funding will support this program that works directly with both cataract and retinal patients statewide who don’t qualify for other service paradigms. For most of these individuals, this approach constitutes their only remaining option to achieve a better quality of life. Operation Sight improves lives and helps lift people out of poverty by restoring vision through free cataract/retina surgery, including pre- and postoperative care and providing glasses when needed to assure positive changes. (South Carolina)
Sea Island Hunger Awareness Foundation: Funding will help provide clean, safe water for drinking, cooking and bathing to residents on Johns and Wadmalaw Islands who have contaminated or unproductive wells. There is no public water on Wadmalaw Island and there are areas of Johns Island that have only wells. This grant will help provide for repair or replacement of contaminated wells, upgrading of the septic system, connecting a source of running water, installing a filtration system, etc., to provide clean, safe water to each family identified. (Charleston)
Smith Medical Clinic: Funds will support the “Diabetes Self-Management: Take Control!” program to purchase glucose monitoring strips for the 30 percent of clinic patients who are unable to contribute anything to defray the clinic’s cost for these testing supplies. The program is designed to help nearly 800 diabetic patients take and keep control of their diabetes. (Georgetown)
SNAC: Funding for this program will support efforts to help the increasing number of homeless children in Florence School District One (FSD1). Motel and food vouchers are offered to families if they are currently homeless and assistance with water, rent, utilities and deposits is provided when they have secured housing. (Florence)
Stepping Stones Ministry: Funding will assist with the replacement of a new roof on the program’s Sober Independent Living house, which is the first phase of a comprehensive recovery program. This program’s goal is to ultimately help participants live on their own by providing them with a work-therapy program until they find employment, save the money they will need to transition to an unassisted living situation, assisting with budgeting, goal setting and implementing long-term plans to help participants return to being sober, responsible and productive members of the community. (Richland, Lexington)
The ARK of South Carolina: Funding will support the ARK’s mission to provide support and relief to families living with Alzheimer’s disease or related dementia by offering respite care, support groups, education, caregiver consultations, and resource referrals. This grant will aid an expansion that will focus on rural areas of the greatest need within the program’s five target counties, which combined have nearly 10,000 caregivers. (Orangeburg, Colleton, Dorchester, Charleston, Berkeley)
Village Group: Funding will support the Summer Academy, which is a 7-week (Monday-Thursday) summer learning opportunity available and targeted to low-income, single-parent families. The Academy is designed to close the learning gap that exists for many students from low-income families, challenge the students with a STEM-related project, provide each student two nutritional meals and a snack each day, promote positive social behavior and expose the youth to a larger world of experience. Bus transportation from nine sites is offered and the program also assists parents by eliminating the expense of child care during the bulk of the summer. (Georgetown)
Vital Aging of Williamsburg County: Funding will support the mission of giving low income seniors the tools they need to remain healthy and happy in their homes and reduce the cost/need of skilled or long-term care. This grant will help provide nutritionally balanced meals to homebound, frail and elderly residents throughout all of Williamsburg County. (Williamsburg)
York County Free Clinic: Funding will support the health and wellness needs of medically uninsured, low income residents of York County. Funds will be used to purchase medications for patients and to purchase an electrocautery for minor surgery treating skin lesions. All medications are provided at no cost to patients, who often cannot afford the very medications that will help them back to good health. (York)
Nonprofit organizations working to meet the needs of the poor in South Carolina who are interested in learning more about the Sisters of Charity Foundation of South Carolina’s grant guidelines are encouraged to visits our website at www.sistersofcharitysc.com.
The Sisters of Charity Foundation of South Carolina, established in 1996, is a ministry of the Sisters of Charity Health System. The Foundation is committed to addressing the needs of the poor and underserved in all 46 South Carolina counties, and strategically uses resources to reduce poverty through action, advocacy and leadership.
Photo from Camp Happy Days, Facebook
