The city of Austin awarded mini-grants to 26 local organizations late last month to support their capacity to prepare for, respond to and recover from shocks and stresses, according to a Sept. 25 press release.
The mini-grants are part of a pilot program launched by the city’s Office of Resilience, which formed in April 2022.
The Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center, the largest provider of unhoused services in Travis County, was one of the organizations awarded a mini-grant by the city. Founder and executive director Mark Hilbelink said the organization has partnered with the city on multiple occasions and gets about half of its income through city contracts.
“When COVID hit, it really changed the face of homelessness in Austin,” Hilbelink said. “It shifted it from being centered around a small group of large agencies to really being driven by faith-based and mutual aid groups that were all over town.”
The center’s offerings include a day center, digital service hotline, mobile outreach program and wellness program, which allows it to “reach people pretty much wherever they are if they’re experiencing homelessness,” Hilbelink said.
“Our ability to bring humanitarian aid, especially to those folks, is really important because a lot of folks see Sunrise’s hub as their core platform for being able to make their journey back towards a sustainable way of living,” Hilbelink said.
Sabrina Sha, development and operations manager of Asian Texans for Justice, said the mini-grant their organization received shows promise that the city cares about investing in education about the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.
“We get a lot of grants through other AAPI-serving organizations or APA-serving foundations,” Sha said. “This is really our first government grant or grant that’s been affiliated with a city.”
Sha said Asian Texans for Justice will use the money from the grant to continue developing the curriculum for…
Read the full article here