Since its inaugural grant-making year in 2021, Impact100 Houston has awarded transformative grants to outstanding nonprofits in five focus areas: Family, Health & Wellness, Environment, Education, and Arts & Culture. Our goal is to provide high-impact grants that reach under-served populations, support nonprofits in their transformative work, and highlight unmet needs in our community. We are grateful to our grantees for their dedication to the city we call home.
2024 Grant Recipient:
B.E.A.R. – Be A Resource For CPS Kids
Award:
$100,000
Focus Area:
Family
Details:
BEAR’s mission is to improve lives by providing hope and help for at-risk and
CPS-involved children and their caretakers in the Greater Houston area. They carry out this mission and vision through the operation of four main programs, and funding from Impact100 Houston will support one of them, the Heart Gallery. The Heart Gallery’s goal is to support children in foster care who have an increased risk of aging out of care for a variety of reasons. Heart Gallery exhibits are traveling photographic exhibits and a community education initiative that brings to life the personalities of children waiting to be adopted. The grant from Impact100 Houston will support this mission by increasing The Heart Gallery’s capacity to serve all of the children who would benefit from the program.
2024 Grant Recipient:
Covenant House Texas
Award:
$100,000
Focus Area:
Health & Wellness
Details:
Covenant House Texas serves homeless youth in Houston ages 18 to 24 with a mission of providing a safe haven, absolute respect, unconditional love, and a path to lasting independence. Impact100 Houston’s grant will support its Young Parents Program, which provides shelter and a continuum of services for homeless pregnant women and young parents, along with their children, ages 0 to 6. The program ensures that young parents have the resources they need to find a path towards stability, while providing a safe place to live and learn with age-appropriate gear, clothing, and developmental toys. Case managers help the youth find childcare placements so they can acquire jobs, while receiving Covenant House Texas’s full continuum of services.
2024 Grant Recipient:
Small Steps Nurturing Center
Award:
$25,333
Focus Area:
Education
Details:
Small Steps’ mission is to provide an exemplary early childhood program to instill and foster the social, emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual growth of economically at-risk children and their families. It is a nationally accredited program that seeks to narrow the opportunity gap for their students by developing the whole child, with the ultimate goal of helping to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty for their families and communities. The grant from Impact100 Houston will help support their recent expansion of two more classrooms, which allowed for 30 additional students, increasing their enrollment to 225 students.
2024 Grant Recipient:
The Ensemble Theater
Award:
$25,333
Focus Area:
Arts & Culture
Details:
The mission of The Ensemble Theatre is to preserve African American artistic expression and enlighten, entertain, and enrich a diverse community. It is the oldest and largest professional African American theatre in the Southwest, and one of only eight African American theatres worldwide that operates its own facility and produces in-house. The grant from Impact100 Houston will support its Youth Education Programs, which includes two programs: Touring Education brings African American stories to life for youth audiences in schools and other community settings, with the goals of diverse youth audiences to see themselves reflected in the stories and to learn from histories that are not always included in their school textbooks. For youth who are interested in pursuing acting, The Ensemble offers its Young Performers Program, an intensive year-round training program for students, ages 6 to 17. Aspiring young actors progress along their training from intermediate to advanced courses and have the opportunity to perform in a Mainstage production. The Ensemble Theatre will offer scholarships, sponsor theater evenings, and bring productions to underserved areas.
2024 Grant Recipient:
The Woods Project
Award:
$25,333
Focus Area:
Environment
Details:
The Woods Project creates wilderness exploration experiences that promote academic success, college and career readiness, and lifelong thriving for Houston high school students who wouldn’t otherwise have access to these opportunities. The Woods Project’s place-based outdoor education and experiential learning opportunities help students develop leadership skills and critical social and emotional learning capacities. Their primary beneficiaries are Houston high school students from low-income communities, between 14 to 18 years of age. A grant from Impact100 Houston would provide operating support to allow The Woods Project to provide year-round outdoor educational experiences to Houston high school students.
2023 Grant Recipient:
RaiseUp Families
Award:
$100,000
Focus Area:
Family
Details:
The mission of RaiseUp Families is to stabilize families in their homes before an eviction occurs, then provide them with skills and resources to become self-sufficient so their children can focus on their education, giving them the opportunity for a better life. RUF seeks to create an AfterCare framework to provide ongoing support and accountability to program graduates; funds will be used to hire a full-time case manager for clients in their final few months in RUF’s assistance program, who will create programming to help further clients’ developed skills, facilitate peer connections and community support.
2023 Grant Recipient:
Houston reVision
Award:
$100,000
Focus Area:
Health & Wellness
Details:
Houston reVision works to break the cycle of isolation among the most profoundly disconnected youth. By connecting one youth at a time to caring adults, positive peers, and a program that works, they offer disconnected youth the opportunity to re-vision hopeful pathways. As reVision has seen an increase in the intensity and severity of the crisis of unhoused youth over the past 12 months, funds from Impact100 Houston will go to providing housing, food, clothing, and transportation support to keep youth off the streets.
2023 Grant Recipient:
Art League Houston
Award:
$15,000
Focus Area:
Arts & Culture
Details:
The mission of Art League Houston (ALH) is to connect the community through diverse, dynamic, and creative experiences that bring people together to see, make, and talk about contemporary visual art. A grant from Impact100 Houston will be used to fund community outreach programs, which make visual arts education accessible to under-resourced groups that would not otherwise have access to these experiences.
2023 Grant Recipient:
Girls Inc. of Greater Houston
Award:
$15,000
Focus Area:
Education
Details:
Girls Inc. of Greater Houston’s mission is to inspire girls to be strong, smart, and bold by providing trusting mentoring relationships, a girls-only environment, research-based curriculum, and hands-on learning. Grant funds will be used to support the organization’s work with girls growing up in neighborhoods affected by violence, attending under-resourced schools, and lacking access to nutrition and health care, equipping these girls with the skills needed to overcome obstacles in their lives and thrive.
2023 Grant Recipient:
Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation
Award:
$15,000
Focus Area:
Environment
Details:
The Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation (CELF) launched in 2003 with the mission to establish sustainability as an integral part of every child’s K-12 learning experience. Funds from an Impact100 Houston grant will be used to engage school communities in economically disadvantaged areas of Greater Houston impacted by disproportionate air and water pollution, with a focus on Title 1 middle and high schools.
2022 Grant Recipient:
Santa Maria Hostel
Award:
$100,000
Focus Area:
Health & Wellness
Details:
Santa Maria Hostel is one of Texas’ largest multi-site residential and outpatient substance use disorder treatment centers for women, and one of a very few to offer a full continuum of services for women who are pregnant or parenting. With the grant from Impact100, Santa Maria will make every space engaging for children – from the first time they step on campus in the lobby to the various residential and community spaces they will move through once in the program.
2022 Grant Recipient:
Target Hunger
Award:
$100,000
Focus Area:
Family
Details:
Target Hunger is one of Houston’s largest non-profit organizations providing direct food assistance to food insecure children, families, and seniors who face the risk of going hungry every day. The grant from Impact100 Houston will ensure Target Hunger is able to successfully return to providing a comprehensive range of hunger alleviation programs in northeast and east Houston to children, families, and seniors in a modality better suited to the community’s rapidly changing needs.
2022 Grant Recipient:
Buffalo Soldiers National Museum
Award:
$17,333
Focus Area:
Arts & Culture
Details:
The Buffalo Soldiers National Museum is dedicated to exploring and displaying the stories and contributions of African Americans in the military by way of performing and visual arts, educational programming, and exhibitions. Funds from Impact100 Houston will support the new Director of Education who will lead the traveling trunk project for Title One schools. The goal is to increase accessibility to history eduction and reduce barriers to the museum, such as travel time and cost.
2022 Grant Recipient:
Houston Tool Bank
Award:
$17,333
Focus Area:
Environment
Details:
The Houston ToolBank serves community-based organizations by providing tools, equipment and expertise to empower their most ambitious goals. Toolbank borrowers include mainstream nonprofits, schools, faith-based organizations, neighborhood associations and many others. General operating funds from Impact100 will be used to keep our organization running smoothly so that we can continue to store, maintain, repair and share our inventory of more than 10,000 tools across the nonprofit sector.
2022 Grant Recipient:
Search Homeless Services
Award:
$17,333
Focus Area:
Education
Details:
SEARCH pursues a mission of providing hope, creating opportunity, and transforming lives for thousands of men, women, and children experiencing homelessness in our community. The grant from Impact100 Houston will support SEARCH’s House of Tiny Treasures, a nationally accredited preschool program that provides developmentally focused early childhood education to children, aged 2 – 5 years, who have experienced homelessness.
2021 Inuagural Grant Recipient:
Angela House
Award:
$100,000
Focus Area:
Family
Details:
The mission of Angela House is to successfully transition women into society after incarceration. Our program provides individual and group therapy, referrals for medical and mental health care, dental and vision care, job readiness training, twelve step-recovery groups, as well as emotional and spiritual support. Funds from Impact100 Houston enabled Angela House to establish an aftercare specialist position and purchase a vehicle to assist with the aftercare program.
2021 Grant Recipient:
Chinquapin Prep
Award:
$22,000
Focus Area:
Education
Details:
Chinquapin Preparatory School is a private college-preparatory school for 6th-12th grade students located 25 miles east of downtown Houston. Since 1969, Chinquapin has prepared motivated students from Houston’s under-resourced communities and schools for college. With funds from Impact100, their licensed psychotherapist was able to build a curriculum with Baylor College of Medicine to provide monthly counseling sessions to faculty and students.
2021 Grant Recipient:
Kids Meals
Award:
$22,000
Focus Area:
Health & Wellness
Details:
Kids’ Meals mission is to end childhood hunger by delivering free healthy meals to the doorsteps of Greater Houston’s hungriest preschool-aged children and through collaboration provide their families with resources to help end the cycle of poverty. Kids’ Meals can feed a child for less than $2 per day as an all-inclusive organizational cost. This includes costs for food, staff, facility, delivery, and other operational expenses. At that cost, the grant funds from Impact100 Houston provided more than 11,000 meals to Houston’s most desperate children.
2021 Grant Recipient:
SPARK School Park Program
Award:
$22,000
Focus Area:
Environment
Details:
The SPARK School Park Program works with schools and neighborhoods to develop community parks on public school grounds. SPARK used the Impact100 Houston funds for the public art component at Hearne Elementary in Alief ISD to enable a professional artist to work with students to design and create mosaic tiles for the seat wall at the new park. Funds were also used for supplies to create a wolf mural (the school mascot) done by art teacher and students.
2021 Grant Recipient:
Theatre Under The Stars
Award:
$22,000
Focus Area:
Arts & Culture
Details:
Theatre Under The Stars, Houston’s non-profit home for musical theatre, is dedicated to enriching lives through innovative musical theatre, inclusive educational curriculums and dynamic community engagement. The Impact100 Houston grant supported The River. The River program provides affordable, accessible arts education to individuals with disabilities and their siblings. Empowering students with disabilities through the arts is a hallmark of The River.