STOCKTON, Calif. — Millions of dollars in grant funding are headed to two Stockton organizations that aim to help and support workforce development, community development, the climate and youth.
The $11.97 million in funding comes from the James Irvine Foundation. The foundation awarded $7.55 million to the San Joaquin Community Foundation and Stockton-based Edge Collaborative. The Reinvent Stockton Foundation was awarded $4.42 million in grants.
Both organizations say that while some of the funding will go toward operations, the majority of it will go back into the community.
"We will continue will continue this work that we began two years ago, and invest in community-led priorities and projects," said Ann Rogan, founder and CEO of Edge Collaborative. "This is really about re-granting dollars to make sure that community priorities that have really never been centered in a meaningful way actually have the resources to do planning work, to be able to pull in and pay staff, to pay experts and outside consultants and then to do the actual project planning to go and prepare to get public money."
Edge Collaborative is a "civic incubator" that partners with organizations to fund and help develop programs aimed at solving challenges that have historically been ignored.
Edge Collaborative is currently offering grants to organizations to help them increase staffing, to be able to pursue other grants.
"What we do is we partner with organizations, this could be public, private or nonprofit organizations, and we will help incubate projects that they are trying to move forward. They are very diverse in nature," said Rogan. "A lot of this is about centering community priorities, particularly those communities that have been overlooked, neglected for resources for decades."
At the Reinvent Stockton Foundation, Executive Director Nik Howard says much of his nonprofit's grant funding will go to helping local youth.
"It's important for our organization so that we can show the rest of the community that while the Reinvent Stockton Foundation has its own flagship programs, we also know that it really takes a big ecosystem of healthy nonprofits serving youth, for us all to be successful," said Howard. "The vast majority of this is going go out to those youth nonprofits and they've told us that it's really, really important for them."
According to Howard, the nonprofit is still developing an application for organizations to request some of the grant funding.
"We're going to put some public information out pretty soon on our grant application process but we're not quite ready yet," said Howard. "Reinvent Stockton is here for the broader community and youth development more broadly and are excited to get these dollars out into the community."
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