Jewish Women's Foundation of Greater Pittsburgh

UpStreet Text-Based Peer Mentoring
Teen depression, anxiety, and suicidality are at an all-time high. (As of December, 2020, Suicide is now the number two cause of death for teens.) Research demonstrates that adolescent girls are at even greater risk of suffering from mental health challenges than boys. In response to this, Jewish Family and Community Services (JFCS) launched UpStreet, a teen mental wellness program that offers drop-in consultations with therapists, scheduled therapy appointments, text-based peer support, and support groups for teens.

Text-based peer support is one of the most innovative services available through UpStreet. Text-based peer mentoring normalizes receiving support for difficult experiences, helping youth develop resilience, and reducing the stigma of seeking mental health support. Text-based mentoring can be accessed anywhere, removing transportation barriers.

Funding from the Jewish Women’s Foundation enabled JFCS to establish a pilot cohort of the text-based peer support program. This cohort was designed specifically for girls and included 20 mentor-mentee pairs.

National Council of Jewish Women, Pittsburgh Section/Center for Women — $30,000

Center for Women: Educating, Connecting, and Activating Women for Financial Stability
Seven years ago, the Center for Women (CFW) was created through a partnership between National Council of Jewish Women NCJW) and Jewish Women’s Foundation (JWF) to fill a service gap in our community at the time: supporting women to financial independence through direct services to individuals, fulfilled by volunteers, such as mentoring and financial coaching. Over the past year, CFW embarked on an environmental scan to identify new opportunities to apply its unique strengths to this ongoing challenge of financial instability for so many women in our region.

As the result of intensive research, and successful outcomes providing virtual Programming in 2020 during the pandemic, CFW shifted its strategies to a two-pronged approach: provide educational programs and networking for women seeking financial stability and build advocacy capacity in order to join the movement to achieve gender equity at work for all women.

This approach has allowed CFW to support individual women while also being informed by and empowering them, so that they can contribute their collective voice towards fixing the broken systems at the root of these problems. Goals included expanding educational topics for virtual workshops, engaging a broad spectrum of presenters, including women of color, and continuing to empower program attendees to action. CFW is also growing its Working Mothers Network to include more women from communities and corporations not yet connected to CFW.

Jewish Community Keystone Grants

Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh — $10,000

Underwriting/Sponsorship —Miracle In Rwanda
JWF funds supported the production of a play, Miracle in Rwanda, and follow-up educational discussions about the play and its themeswith local, under-served young women whom they have partnered with in thepast. Miracle in Rwanda is a true story of an African woman’s survival,hopelessness, faith, and resilience as she hid in a 3x4 foot bathroom formonths with seven other women during the Rwanda Genocide.

Post-performance activities included a virtual round-table with the actress and the woman behind the story, Rwandan Genocide Survivor Immacule Ilibagiza, and following the opening of the play, the Holocaust Center hosted four to eight additional screenings for local high school students, educators, and communities of under-served young women such as JADA House International, Gwen’s Girls, Sarah Heinz House, and others. In these conversations with the young women, facilitated by their educators and staff from these organizations, the girls gave feedback on their opinions from the play, and the messages it gave them that relates to their life today.

The goal was to reach 50 to 100 young women.

JFunds — $10,000

Financial Coaching
JFunds is a formal collaboration among the five organizations/programs that offer financial assistance in the Pittsburgh Jewish community: Hebrew Free Loan, Jewish Assistance Fund, JFCS Squirrel Hill Food Pantry (SOS Pittsburgh), Jewish Scholarship Service of Greater Pittsburgh, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s Israel Scholarships. Community members access funding from these programs separately or simultaneously.

JWF funds supported the continuation of a financial coaching program, which was made available for free to members of the Jewish community, constituents of the Center for Women, and the public. Marketing of this financial coaching opportunity targeted women and members of the Jewish community. In 2020, 74% of the financial coach’s appointments were with women (either individually or as part of a couple).

Services offered include budgeting/spending plans, debt management, credit score improvement, student loan payment plan assistance, best practices for credit card use, general financial literacy as needed, and retirement planning. In addition, the financial coach offered quarterly one hour financial workshops.

General Community Keystone Grants

Angels' Place — $10,000

Unrestricted Operating Grant
Since 1984, Angels’ Place has provided exceptional family support and quality early childhood education to help parents in need and their children become lifelong learners, and support the parents on their road to economic independence. Its unique services are offered to families, qualifying as low-income, who confront challenges that daily threaten their stability.

This unrestricted operating grant supported the annual operating budget for the 2020-2021 program year as Angels’ Place navigated uncertainties unfolding due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This support allowed the agency to provide Early Childhood Education and Family Support programming at no cost or significantly reduced rates to single parent low-income families, elevating the lives of families at risk and setting them on a strategic path to success for school and life.

Crisis Center North — $9,500

Unrestricted Operating Grant
According to a 2020 United Nations (UN) Women analysis, COVID-19 resulted in a sharp spike in incidents of gender-based violence, sounding the alarm that the pandemic “will likely disproportionately affect women, exacerbate preexisting gendered risks and vulnerabilities, and widen inequalities.” Research has shown that social isolation fuels incidents of gender-based violence, and the power and control exerted by abusers over their victims were manifested due to COVID-19.

Financial support secured through the Jewish Women’s Foundation enabled Crisis Center North (CCN) to continue critical victim service and programming delivery to women and girls negatively impacted by gender-based violence at the hands of their abusers. While operating support is vital to the livelihood of any nonprofit during normal operating conditions, it was even more critical in the midst of two concurrent global public health crises (i.e., COVID-19 pandemic and violence against women) to innovate and transform new paradigms for trauma-informed, empowerment-based victim services.

Neighborhood Academy — $10,000

Microgrants to Accomplished Girls for Inspiring Causes (MAGIC) Program.
The Neighborhood Academy is a faith-based, college preparatory, independent school whose mission is to break the cycle of generational poverty by empowering youth and preparing them for college and citizenship. The school aims to provide fulfilling opportunities to students that set them up for future success, which would have been otherwise inaccessible.

This grant supported female-identifying students and alumnae through the administration and delivery of microgrants in a new Microgrants to Accomplished Girls for Inspiring Causes (MAGIC) Program. The MAGIC Program enabled students to have flexibility and opportunity to access resources that benefitted them academically, financially, psychosocially, spiritually, and physically.

The Neighborhood Academy also prioritized support to help meet the needs of female alumnae who struggle to make it through college because of financial setbacks or emotional trauma related to COVID-19. Though tuition may be largely covered by scholarships or grants for some students, daily survival needs such as food and housing remain unmet, and full-time counselors at TNA found frequent check-ins from female alumnae for emotional support rising during COVID-19. Microgrants to TNA
alumnae through the MAGIC Program enabled the school to help them remain in college despite adverse circumstances.

Open Field — $10,000

Soccer + Life Skills Program
Open Field’s mission is to improve the lives and futures of youth through sports. For more than a decade, their team has facilitated programming to promote health, education, gender equity, leadership, and life skills to more than 4,000 youth in low resource communities through the global game of soccer.

In the Pittsburgh community, they engage minority, immigrant, and refugee youth (majority girls), primarily living in Northview Heights and Crafton Heights neighborhoods, in meaningful activities and positive relationships. Many of their youth participants have experienced and continue to experience trauma, first as refugees being forced to flee from their homes and/or live in a refugee camp and second as minorities in the U.S., living in some of poorest and more dangerous neighborhoods in the city.

Open Field utilizes a sport-based youth development approach that incorporates educational messaging, empowering conversations, and interactive activities into soccer sessions led by caring adults and older teenagers who serve as coach-mentors and role models.

The project JWF funded was the Soccer + Life Skills programming for 40 refugee girls in Pittsburgh (approximately 20 girls in Crafton Heights and 20 girls in Northview Heights). The girls-only activities were led by female coach mentors and happened 2-3 times per week from May through October 2021.

Planned Parenthood — $2,500

Unrestricted Operating Grant
For 90 years, Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania (PPWP) has served the reproductive health care needs of our community with a mission to provide contraceptive information and supplies to women who needed to restrict their family sizes to safeguard their physical and economic well-being. Over the years, PPWP’s mission has expanded to provide high-quality reproductive health care services, comprehensive sexuality education, and strategic advocacy. JWF support was an unrestricted operating grant.

Ruling Our Experiences (ROX) — $8,000

Funding to establish five new ROX Programs at schools throughout Allegheny County
Ruling Our eXperiences, Inc. (ROX) is the national nonprofit leader in programming, research and education focused on girls. Its mission is to create generations of confident girls who control their own relationships, experiences, decisions and futures. They believe that we must simultaneously impact girls, educate and support the adult influencers in girls’ lives and improve the societal conditions that have the potential to negatively impact girls.

Support from the Jewish Women’s Foundation provided funding to establish five new ROX Programs at schools throughout Allegheny County. Funding also allowed 75 girls the opportunity to participate in the evidence-based ROX Program for Girls at their schools during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years. During the 20-week program implementation, the ROX Program for Girls allows female students to develop the skills to find value and worth in themselves and their abilities, and then focuses on teaching the skills necessary to negotiate the challenges they will face during their adolescentyears.

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