Three teams won the Common Good Challenge on Wednesday evening, May 24, each taking home a prize of $100,000 in grant funding for coming up with a solution to a problem in their communities.
The Common Good Challenge is the fifth prize under the New Arizona Prize banner and is a collaboration between the Arizona Community Foundation, The Arizona Republic and Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy.
The New Arizona Prize was first established in 2014 by the Community Foundation in partnership with The Republic and Morrison Institute.
The Common Good Challenge is a grant competition designed to embrace the idea that society benefits when people from diverse perspectives and backgrounds develop solutions to community problems, according to the initiative’s website.
Winning teams each received a $100,000 grant to go toward their project. It’s the first year that the $300,000 total has been divided among separate teams — in most of the previous years, the grant has just gone toward one team, said Jamie Dempsey, the Community Foundation’s acting chief program and community engagement officer.
The remaining three finalists Wednesday each received a $10,000 grant.
The first three years were focused on finding solutions to the water crisis, with the grant going to one person. The most recent New Arizona Prize concerned affordable housing, with five winners getting $50,000.
Dempsey said the New Arizona Prize received the most applications this year, probably due to the subject being broadened.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations began partnering in new ways to serve their communities. So, when the Community Foundation initially started planning the grant in 2021, it was important to communicate that local organizations were the best ones to identify which issues their communities were facing, Dempsey said.
“It promotes a culture of philanthropy where everybody — regardless of their background, regardless of their checking account balance — they feel they can contribute their time, talent and treasure to make Arizona the best state in the country,” said Foundation president and CEO Anna Maria Chávez.
While it’s too early to tell what the next New Arizona Prize will be, Chávez said the next few months are going to be spent going into communities around the state. Foundation staff will talk to students, nonprofit leaders and other stakeholders to figure out what issues people would like to see the organization focus on.
Thirty-eight teams submitted projects for the prize, which were then evaluated by a 32-member panel. Six teams qualified as finalists and were announced earlier this month. Those six teams competed Wednesday night at the Creighton University Health Sciences Campus in Central Phoenix, where they pitched their projects to a nine-member panel that included, among others, Chavez and Republic executive editor Greg Burton.
Teams identified a problem in their community and worked to find a solution to the problem. Here’s what the three winners pitched.
Anytown Leadership Program
Serving Coconino, Gila, Maricopa, Pima, Yavapai and Yuma counties, Anytown is a camp that has been around for 65 years and works at stopping hate speech. It’s a human relations organization that facilitates leadership and diversity programs for young people, said president and camp director Amber Checky.
Anytown’s model includes a summer leadership program as well as school-based programs throughout the year, said camp director Amanda Delphy. Programs educate young people about the value of diversity and inclusion, and how to recognize and counter things like stereotypes and discrimination.
“This award is really a game changer for our program. We are 100% volunteer-run and we just know this award is going to profoundly impact the number of youth that we’re going to be able to serve across our state” Checky said after the ceremony.
Boys to Men Tucson
The Healthy Intergenerational Masculinity Initiative, serving Pima County, aims to address crises resulting from how boys are raised, like gender-based violence, the achievement gap, school shootings, addiction and untreated mental health issues.
Many young boys don’t have a father figure in their lives and are bombarded with harmful messages about manhood and masculinity, said Michael Brasher, former CEO of Boys to Men Tucson.
The organization is a mentorship program that was initially designed for schools, but now works with other local organizations, according to the Boys to Men website. The program typically consists of talking circles involving both youth and adult men. The talking circles are weekly and free, with 400 teenage boys currently being served from the program, said Lance Meeks, director of community engagement for Goodwill of Southern Arizona.
The organization has goals to expand to serve even more boys, and to also recruit more men of color for leadership positions, Meeks said. The organization is also advocating for policy changes in the community that harm men of color.
“We are piloting restorative justice circles in place of punitive practices. We intend to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline,” Meeks said.
After the program, Brasher said he’s feeling overwhelmed about winning the grant.
“I had to keep myself from crying,” Brasher said, of hearing that Boys to Men had won.
Read Better Be Better
Read Better Be Better is an organization serving Maricopa County that aims to improve reading skills in children. The After-School Literacy Instruction pairs local middle school leaders with third grade readers and is facilitated by college education majors.
CEO Sophie Allen-Etchart said 41% of children are not reading at their grade level. The number drops to about 27% when race and poverty are factored in, she said.
It’s important that the program caters to third graders because it’s the last grade that children are taught to read, Allen-Etchart said. If a child cannot read at grade level by the end of that year, they’re four times less likely to graduate high school, Allen-Etchart said.
The program was first piloted at a school in Phoenix with 30 children in 2015, Allen-Etchart said. And this semester, 13,000 students will graduate from the program.
While the program is effective, Allen-Etchart said, it’s not a solution to the root cause of the issue.
“It is my passionate belief that nonprofits have a responsibility to look beyond the programmatic solution that they are delivering right now and into root causes and prevention strategies,” Allen-Etchart said.
And the root cause of the issue is Arizona’s teacher shortage, which is where Glendale Community College comes in. The campus is a Hispanic-serving college with primarily elementary and special education majors in its teacher education program, said Heather Merrill, the college’s assistant department chair for education.
With Read Better Be Better, education majors have the opportunity to complete their field experience, in addition to providing a financial incentive.
“It was pretty scary but I’m really, really proud of what the team was able to pull off,” Allen-Etchart said after the ceremony. “And it’s $100,000, so that’s a big deal for us.”
To learn more about the Arizona Community Foundation and the Common Good prize, visit the websites at https://www.azfoundation.org/ and https://www.commongoodchallenge.org/
Republic Executive Editor Greg Burton was a judge for the Common Good Challenge. The Arizona Community Foundation also supports The Republic’s housing inequality coverage.
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