WISE & Healthy, a Santa Monica-based social services non-profit, has just received a $200,000 two-year core support grant from the Weingart Foundation of Los Angeles, with a start date of January 2014.
The new grant provides welcome capacity building support for four core programs, announced WISE & Healthy Aging President and CEO Grace Cheng Braun.
These are:
• The City & County of Los Angeles Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, which protects the rights of seniors and disabled adults in more than 1,800 long-term care facilities throughout Los Angeles County,
• The Adult Day Service Center, the only Alzheimer’s Day Resource Center in Westside Los Angeles, providing day care, respite, and caregiver support,
• In-Home Service Care Management, providing information and referrals, care management, assistance in enrolling for government benefits, and visits to homebound elderly persons, and
• Mental Health Services, which include individual and group therapy, physician-supervised psychiatric medication management, case management, and a unique senior-to-senior peer counseling program.
Cheng Braun said the organization was most grateful for this timely and generous support.
“The Weingart funding comes at a time of real economic challenge for community-based service providers like WISE & Healthy Aging when our public funding continues to be greatly reduced, and private donors can’t always fill the gap,” Braun said.
According to the Weingart Foundation, providing unrestricted, multi-year core operating support, when combined with the strong leadership and management of organizations like WISE & Healthy Aging, is one of the most effective ways to build nonprofit organizational capacity.
Core Support grants provide the “working capital” nonprofits need to sustain and improve their operations and necessary infrastructure.
This type of funding has been particularly critical during the tough economic climate of the last five years that has caused government funding to decrease so dramatically even for well-run, firmly established human services providers like WISE & Healthy Aging.
What CEOs like Cheng Braun especially appreciate about the grants is the way they are designed — not as a simple hand-out, but to provide immediate funds that support them in developing and implementing both short-term and long-term strategies to improve their organizations’ capacity-building and sustainability.
“The Weingart Foundation is very astute in its approach to funding, in that their grant enables us to strengthen our own financial viability,” Cheng Braun said. “That will help us become even better able to sustain ourselves through good times and bad. The new year 2014 will be especially bright for WISE & Healthy Aging, thanks to their support.”
For more information about WISE & Healthy Aging’s extensive range of free and fee-based services for older adults and caregivers, call 310.394.9871 or go to www.wiseandhealthyaging.org.
