Farmers Feeding Families RFP
We seek to identify community programs and services that increase access to food and combat food insecurity in Shelby County. Our goal is to ensure that individuals are able to live healthy lives free from hunger and its associated health issues and move more freely toward self-sufficiency with this barrier removed.
What do three seniors from Central High School, Male, and Manual who all earned college scholarships, all headed toward careers in the medical field, and all with the intention of using their degrees to help give back to their communities have in common? As it turns out, a lot. Each have heart, determination, a sense of humor, and a little help from Project Ready to help them build confidence, set goals, and learn how to reach those goals.
Project Ready is a Louisville Urban League program driven by Metro United Way that focuses on college and career exploration, STEM-awareness, goal planning, academic enrichment, leadership development, social skills, and community service learning. But enough about that, let’s show you how Project Ready works on an individual level.
Trinity is an amazing young lady who has earned a scholarship to Norfolk State University in Virginia, where she wants to study psychology in order to give back to her community and society. In particular, she is troubled by the suicide rate in her community and wants to help address that problem head-on. A former introvert, Project Ready helped Trinity develop the self-confidence and the soft skills that were necessary to seek out her scholarship opportunities and capitalize on them.
Like the first Trinity, Trinity 2 has earned a scholarship to college, only this college is Fisk University in Nashville. Fisk is a historically black college where Trinity hopes to major in Biology and minor in Spanish with her sights set on being an OB-GYN one day. Trinity isn’t just doing this all for herself either. She wants to help encourage others and set an example in order to help young people get involved in “fields you don’t typically see many African Americans in.” Her favorite part of Project Ready was its Love Notes Program, which is all about nurturing healthy relationships.
Okay, Grace isn’t just here to make sure there aren’t three Trinitys, she’s here to set another example of what young people can accomplish with intelligence, perseverance, and a tiny bit of guidance. Grace knew the importance of getting a scholarship and Project Ready helped her develop the skills to do just that. Now she’s headed off to Fisk University to grab a degree in Psychology and another degree in Biology, so she can become a Psychiatrist devoted to helping minority children.
These young ladies represent a total of 18 Project Ready students who are on their way to college, because they worked hard and earned scholarships. Most of these scholarship winners live in communities where only three percent of the 25 and over population has a bachelor’s degree compared to eighteen percent for Jefferson County as a whole. They had to work harder to overcome obstacles that stand in the way of their success and prosperity and now we want to reward their hard work and help them get comfortable in their new surroundings by providing dorm-room kits that you can help us purchase.
Our goal is to raise $1,350, which will cover the cost of 18 dorm-room kits that include bedware and toiletries to help get these remarkable young scholars off to a good start in college.