East Boston Social Centers Awarded Grant by the Cummings Foundation

The East Boston Social Centers is one of 130 local nonprofits to receive grants of $100,000 to $500,000 each through Cummings Foundation’s $20 Million Grant Program.  The East Boston organization was chosen from a total of 738 applicants during a competitive review process.

Executive Director Justin Pasquariello, Family Engagement Network Director Gloria DeVine, and other staff will join other awardees at a virtual Grant Winner Celebration on June 11 at 6PM to celebrate the $20 million infusion of into the nonprofit sector. With the conclusion of this grant cycle, Cummings Foundation has now awarded more than $260 million to Greater Boston nonprofits alone.

With these funds, the East Boston Social Centers will support strong families and child development by expanding its Welcome Baby program to a year-long program with monthly contact, and reaching more families. There is a need to radically improve the rates at which children reach Kindergarten ready to learn in East Boston. To do this, the East Boston Social Centers is developing a modified collective impact model with the vision that all children in East Boston will enter Kindergarten ready to learn, joyful and thriving.

Per East Boston Social Center Executive Director Justin Pasquariello, “With the wonderful, philanthropic support of the Cummings Foundation, which we are so grateful for, we will significantly deepen and expand our Parent Partner led Welcome Baby program.  We will deepen it from the current one visit per family to a program with three in-person visits and 9 telephonic check-ins per family and we will expand it from the current approximately 60 families served per year to 180.  Further, building off the work we began with our first Cummings Foundation grant, we will continue to work with the cohort of home visiting programs that has been meeting to ensure we are meeting the needs of as many unduplicated children and families as possible.  We believe we will be able to ensure all East Boston families who want a home visiting program will have access to one—and we will continue to work as a network to increase the impact of all such programs.”

As a place-based philanthropic initiative, the Cummings $20 Million Grant Program seeks to support nonprofits in Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk counties in eastern Massachusetts. Each year, this program awards 130 grants to a diverse group of charities. These awards include 100 grants of $100,000 each, plus 30 ten-year grants of up to $500,000 each. These grants fund a wide variety of local causes, including underserved populations, healthcare, social justice, and education. Through this place-based initiative, Cummings Foundation aims to give back in the area where it owns commercial buildings, all of which are managed, at no cost to the Foundation, by its affiliate Cummings Properties. Founded in 1970 by Bill Cummings of Winchester, the Woburn-based commercial real estate firm leases and manages 11 million square feet of space, the majority of which exclusively benefits the Foundation.

This year’s diverse group of grant recipients represents a wide variety of causes, including homelessness prevention and affordable housing, education, violence prevention, and food insecurity. Most of the grants will be paid over two to five years.

Founded in 1918, East Boston Social Centers, Inc. is a 501 (C) (3) multi-service agency, serving culturally diverse families and individuals of all ages in East Boston and throughout Greater Boston. The programs provided include early learning, school age, teen, family engagement, and older adult programs, which directly reach ~3,000 diverse residents of East Boston and surrounding communities each year; their facilities also host thousands more for a variety of community purposes. For more information about the organization and its programs, please visit www.ebsoc.org.

Woburn-based Cummings Foundation, Inc. was established in 1986 by Joyce and Bill Cummings. The Foundation directly operates its own charitable subsidiaries, including New Horizons retirement communities in Marlborough and Woburn. Bill Cummings released his self-written memoir, “Starting Small and Making It Big: An Entrepreneur’s Journey to Billion-Dollar Philanthropist,” in March 2018.

Additional information is available at www.CummingsFoundation.org.

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