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Community Impact
Great Grants: Great Work with Great Hearts!
The Community Foundation’s approach to community impact work is to make data-driven decisions, build broad-based partnerships, avoid duplication, promote collaboration, emulate best practices in other communities, and stay focused on working through our strengths. In our bi-state community, this work on most issues entails convening Iowa and Illinois stakeholders.
We identify strategic initiative opportunities through an ongoing comprehensive community assessment partnership with the United Way of the Quad Cities Area, The Moline Foundation, and the Quad City Health Initiative. Our current initiatives are based on results from the Quad Cities Community Vitality Scan, which clearly demonstrates that people at or below 200% of the federal poverty guidelines experience a strikingly lower quality of life.
Given the immensity of poverty as a social problem, Community Foundation Board members decided to focus on identifying partnerships and interventions that could improve high school graduation rates as the best way to create positive change. Out of this first Great Grants effort, the Achieve Quad Cities initiative has been formed to align community resources to better address this challenging issue.
We are also working strategically in partnerships related to early childhood care and education, nursing workforce development, regional Mississippi River advocacy, homelessness issues, and regional disaster relief. Great Grants initiatives are intended to bring greater resources to bear on important quality of life issues for the Quad Cities.