Members of The Community Foundation’s Montgomery County Advisory Board, staff, and Sharing Montgomery donors recently visited with key community partners in Germantown, Maryland -- one of the “Priority Neighborhoods” identified by The Community Foundation as part of its new 10-year strategic plan.
The day began at Captain James E. Daly Elementary School, where the group met with school administrators and leaders of the Thriving Germantown coalition – a collaboration launched by the Healthcare Initiative Foundation, Shepperd Pratt (locally known as Family Services), and other nonprofits to holistically connect students and their families to vital supports.
Principal Pedro Cedeño explained, “We have 618 students here at Captain James E. Daly Elementary. More than 77 percent of them are enrolled in the Free and Reduced-price Meal Program. Partnerships like Thriving Germantown have been critical to helping us meet the needs of our students and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Daly Elementary School’s student population is 56% Latinx, 28% Black, 6% Asian, and 6% White. School and nonprofit staff both noted the importance of providing linguistically and culturally appropriate support to fully engage the families and foster a sense of community.
“In the years prior to COVID, most nonprofits didn’t provide services north of Gaithersburg,” Sharon Settlemyer, a Community School Liaison at the school added. “As a result, many of our families spent hours on public transportation just to get food.”
To combat this challenge, the school staff worked with Thriving Germantown’s network of community partners to set up a food pantry on the school’s campus and began connecting parents to other resources for clothing, training, job opportunities, and more.
While acknowledging these efforts have made great strides in helping families address their basic needs, both school staff and nonprofits were acutely aware of systemic breakdowns which hinder economic mobility that would led to greater stability. They especially flagged the numerous barriers families face in securing affordable, accessible childcare which is necessary to get and keep a job.
The group then moved to the Up-County Wellness Center where they met with representatives from local nonprofits providing a continuum of supports from basic needs through economic mobility: Care For Your Health, Up-County Hub, Identity, Inc., CareerCatchers, and Shepperd Pratt. While reflecting on both accomplishments, lessons learned, and the work ahead, the nonprofit leaders emphasized the importance of leveraging and cultivating relationships with community members.
“This isn’t charity,” Anna Maria Izquierdo-Porrera with Care 4 Your Health explained. “These are vital members of the community, all of whom have talents and gifts to share. Investing in them is key to the recovery of our community.”
She went on to point out how this is especially true in immigrant communities, where trust is often as great a barrier as language or culture.
“These folks are used to nonprofits showing up for a short time and then disappearing,” Grace Rivera-Oven with Up-County Hub added. She added that to truly make a lasting difference, “you need to be willing to stick with the community; to listen to them and be willing to invest in them.”
Representatives pointed to the recent COVID vaccination initiative as an example. At the height of the pandemic, Latinos made up 77 percent of COVID cases in Montgomery County. Working in collaboration with Up-County, Care 4 Your Health and others, the County government launched the Salud & Bienestar (Health & Wellbeing) initiative – which was so successful that Montgomery County’s Latinx population become one of the most vaccinated in the country; even going so far as to surpass the County’s more affluent White population.
However, like many efforts launched during the pandemic, the initiative’s outreach efforts have scaled back as the county’s federal relief dollars dwindled.
“The problems that our community is facing won’t just go away overnight,” Rivera-Oven continued. “We need the government to keep showing up.”
The group ended the day at the Middlebrook Mobile Home Park, where they spoke with resident leaders to hear about their priorities for their community and ways they are they have been empowered to help drive change. One of the neighborhood’s elders spoke of how she became the leader of a collective effort to address concerns the residents are being overcharged for some of their basic utilities. We also heard from a young man who, even though he moved out of the trailer park, comes back every week to help with food distributions and other outreach efforts. Nicknamed “El Comandante,” he recalled how he used his background in IT to provide tech support for the neighborhood’s children when school were operating remotely.
Rivera-Oven and Izquierdo-Porrera noted that partnering with residents has been the key to their organizations’ ability to not only provide services, but also build lasting community relationships with other entities such as the Police Department and the Fire Department which have contributed greatly to the well-being of the community.
“Before COVID, the crime rate in this community was very high,” El Comandante shared. “Now that they come to help with the food distribution, it’s much safer.”
Following the tour, Anna Hargrave, Executive Director for Montgomery County for the Greater Washington Community Foundation, reflected on two key takeaways:
It was gratifying to see the incredible outcomes achieved by grantees of our covid-response efforts. Their achievements prove that investments in organizations which center racial equity ultimately make our entire community healthier.
The pandemic forced government and nonprofits to cut red tape and innovate at lightning speed. Moving forward, it will be important that we continue to test out new ideas, “fail forward” by learning and improving, and then scaling solutions that work—all while meeting the urgent demands of the day.
On behalf of The Community Foundation, we must give special thanks all the resident leaders, Daly elementary school staff, our nonprofit guest speakers for sharing their wisdom, and to our funding peer, the Healthcare Initiative Foundation, who led a similar community tour seven years ago which sparked the creation of the Thriving Germantown coalition and helped “plant seeds” for other partnerships that ultimately launched during the pandemic.
To learn more about upcoming in-person and virtual visits plus other learning opportunities, contact Olivia Hsu at ohsu@thecommunityfoundation.org.