An effort to coordinate services for area human trafficking victims received a $75,000 boost from the Toledo Community Foundation.
The grant, awarded to the University of Toledo Foundation, is the largest of nine grants totaling $216,646 announced Monday by the community foundation. The money comes from the community foundation’s unrestricted funds, for which the philanthropic organization accepts applications twice a year.
The $75,000 grant made to the UT Foundation will support the work of the Partners Against Trafficking in Humans Project.
The money will be used to help coordinate services provided by numerous area organizations to victims of human trafficking and then show how those services help improve lives.
“We assist in helping to coordinate those services and then to study and build better outcomes,” said Celia Williamson, a social work professor and director of the Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute at UT.
The work will help agencies work together in more efficient ways and document “the healing that happens,” she said.
The Kidney Foundation of Northwest Ohio received the second-largest grant of this cycle. The Toledo-based agency will use the $36,461 to conduct an evaluation of its patient services — which range from financial assistance to educational programs that target prevention and awareness of kidney disease.
“We want to collect data to analyze specific ways to improve the program,” said executive director Holly Hoagland-Fojtik.
The evaluation will look at health behaviors, quality of health, and adherence to doctors’ schedules, among other items. Interviews with patients, nephrologists, dietitians, medical social workers, and nurses will be conducted as part of the review.
The community foundation received 39 grant applications for this round of grants. Other recipients include $22,500 to the Aurora Project, Inc.; $5,000 to the Council of Michigan Foundations; $30,240 to the East Toledo Family Center; $3,500 to the Cleveland-based Foundation Center to support northwest Ohio programming; $16,765 to Partners in Education; $4,600 to Toledo Public Schools for a new after-school theater arts program, and $18,260 to the Toledo Zoological Society to expand the Play Naturally Toledo program and $4,320 to evaluate that same play program.
Proposals for the next round of grant funding are due Jan. 15.
Contact Vanessa McCray at: vmccray@theblade.com or 419-724-6065, or on Twitter @vanmccray.
First Published December 20, 2016, 5:00 a.m.
