Girls For A Change Kicks Off the New Year With Nearly $1 Million in Grant Funding
Girls For A Change (GFC), a leading non-profit organization for urban youth, today announced it was granted $200,000 in grant funding and leadership training as one of Bank of America’s Neighborhood Excellence 2006 recipients for its work empowering young, local, urban girls to become social change agents. In addition, the organization secured additional funding in the amount of $700,000 in growth capital from New Profit Inc., a national venture philanthropy fund.
The Neighborhood Excellence award goes to organizations that mesh with Bank of America’s mission to partner with groups that help with affordable housing, financial literacy, family support services and performing arts. Recipient organizations can use the money where the need is the greatest in their operating budgets. This award will help to strengthen GFC’s Silicon Valley site by providing more resources to continue to train a powerful force of girls. Technological innovations are no longer the sole vision here in the valley. Amazing things are on the verge of prospering within non-profit organizations, and GFC is an up-and-comer, serving approximately 1,000 girls a year.
“We were proud to select Girls For A Change as a recipient of Bank of America’s 2006 Neighborhood Excellence Initiative awards,” said Raquel Gonzalez, President, Bank of America – Silicon Valley. “Their innovative approach to social change epitomizes the spirit of Neighborhood Excellence — improving communities throughout Silicon Valley, and now throughout the country.”
Girls For A Change will use the funding from New Profit Inc. for nationwide expansion into several major cities over the course of four years. This grant will enable immediate research into problems affecting girls throughout the USA and help them to implement social change policies in their neighborhoods, ultimately reaching out to assist girls everywhere. GFC recognizes that social problems facing today’s urban youth are becoming an epidemic, and for this reason GFC is taking steps towards facilitating positive change. GFC makes it possible for girls throughout the entire nation to have the chance to develop their voice, ability and problem solving capacity to create community change in their own neighborhoods and continue on to become prominent players in the work force.
“We decided to invest in Girls For A Change because Niko Everett and Whitney Smith are social entrepreneurs with vision, passion, and a plan to reinvent society’s traditional stereotypes of urban girls,” said New Profit President and Founder, Vanessa Kirsch. “Girls For A Change offers a different future for America, one in which urban girls are an integral force in solving our most pressing local social problems. We look forward to working with Niko and Whitney in the coming years to help them grow their organization and change opportunities for girls across the nation.”
“We are very excited and honored to accept Bank of America’s Award and New Profit’s grant,” said Whitney Smith, Co-CEO, Girls For A Change. “This huge milestone for us is a great recognition of GFC’s work thus far, and will help tremendously as we continue our success in the Silicon Valley site and reach out to girls in the local community, while simultaneously working towards national expansion and growing the organization as a whole. We are very grateful to Bank of America and New Profit Inc., and look forward to launching our efforts to ensure that these generous awards will have the greatest potential positive impact on millions of young girls’ lives and their communities.”
About Bank of America
Bank of America is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk-management products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving more than 55 million consumer and small business relationships with more than 5,700 retail banking offices, nearly 17,000 ATMs and award-winning online banking with more than 20 million active users. Bank of America is the No. 1 overall Small Business Administration (SBA) lender in the United States and the No. 1 SBA lender to minority-owned small businesses. The company serves clients in 175 countries and has relationships with 98 percent of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies and 80 percent of the Global Fortune 500. Bank of America Corporation stock (NYSE: BAC) is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
About New Profit Inc.
Since 1998, New Profit has worked to help social entrepreneurs meet the challenge of building their organizations to scale their social impact. Through its venture philanthropy fund, New Profit provides multi-year financial and strategic support from individual investors and its signature partner, Monitor Group, to extraordinary social sector leaders whose organizations have the potential to create broad-scale change in the United States. In recent years, New Profit has begun to pilot investments in social entrepreneurs operating internationally. New Profit also organizes convenings and drives other efforts to release the potential of social entrepreneurship. New Profit aspires to build a community dedicated to creating high-impact social change through a new approach to philanthropy. To learn more visit: http://www.newprofit.com.
About Girls For A Change
Girls For A Change (GFC), a non-profit organization, catalyzes professional women to support urban middle and high school girls to become social change makers and innovators, by empowering them to design, lead, fund and implement social change projects that tackle problems they face in their neighborhoods. GFC provides the tools, resources and support girls need to move from being spectators to being leaders. To learn more about the organization please visit: http://www.girlsforachange.org/ or http://www.hercity.org/.