This project will help enrolled GEC families receive start-up funding or ongoing support in the form of micro-grants, to be used to start or grow a family business and contribute to our whole-family and whole-child approach for creating long-term change.
Many times in educational equity work, advocates focus solely on providing the students with financial, academic, and leadership assistance. While this is crucial, fighting to end cycles of poverty and inequity means conducting needs assessments with the communities themselves to determine the roots of poverty and to identify opportunities for change. At GEC, we believe in working inter-generationally with our students, their families, and communities to ensure we take a holistic approach.
With the COVID-19 relief funding we provided, one parent was able to invest a small amount into restarting her small business and provide continuous income for her family in a time of global stress. Inspired by her initiative, we wanted to facilitate more opportunities for parents to invest in their families. This project will help our mission of ending cycles of poverty and creating pathways to access education because it supports parents in providing for their children long-term.
This project will support families in the GEC community who have ideas for new businesses or who are looking for support in their ongoing business. It will also provide parents with business planning support as they are asked to develop and present a business and financial model to apply. As our vision at GEC is not solely focused on educational opportunities or impacting just one generation of students, this initiative takes a whole-family and whole-child approach to enact long-term change.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).