Disaster Response Virgin Islands Project #31089

St. Croix Foundation CARE Fund

by St. Croix Foundation for Community Development

Project Report | May 21, 2024
Fusing the Past and Present for Future Resilience

By Lilli Cox | Dir. Communications & Community Investments

Convening community around future resilience!

The 2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season is less than a month away. Now, as with every year, preparation and resilience are top priorities for all coastal communities across the region to mitigate damage from a potential storm. On St. Croix, the work is two-fold, for while we focus on the tomorrows yet to come, St. Croix Foundation and our partners are diligently employed on multiple fronts to meet current and emerging needs that still continue to challenge our community after the 2017 hurricanes.

Today, we are undertaking a massive capital project that will create St. Croix’s largest and most modern shelter in downtown Christianstiansted to help insure our community against future harm. But our work around this shelter is also focused deeply on healing the wounds of past storms, literal and figurative, that have been neglected far too long. So while the world strives to confront the symptoms of climate change, particularly for marginalized People and Places, we are heedful that a community’s resilience is not just about hardened infrastructure for schools, hospitals, and utilities; it is also about the health of our Social Infrastructure and our People’s hearts and minds.

Helping to Heal the Past and Secure Our Future through the Humanities
In our last report, we described our vision for Sunday Market Square, one of the oldest planned public squares in the United States. Seated in historic downtown Christiansted, the Square represents a unique history linked to Denmark’s colonial rule and influence on the island of St. Croix from 1733 to 1917. Serving as a center for trading among Crucians in the 1700s, the Square was a designated convening space where enslaved Africans were permitted to sell produce, trade goods, connect with loved ones, and socialize in the marketplace on Sundays – their only day off from forced labor. While it remained a popular gathering spot for residents through the 1900s, after several decades of neglect, coupled with the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, the Square fell into disrepair.

Long a part of the Foundation’s comprehensive downtown revitalization work, today we are focused on renovating and retrofitting the Alexander Theater, which sits in the Square, as a critically important shelter for the People of St. Croix that will also serve as our island’s only indoor theater. Combined with complimentary co-working and training spaces we have planned for the Square, our Vision also encompasses the humanities for our nonprofits, our youth, and our community as a whole. Ultimately, a Holistic and Rooted Communal Space of Healing is our overarching Vision!

In the last quarter, we’ve been very busy. Continuing to work closely with our arts and humanities nonprofits to inform programming and design, the conceptual design of the theater is now complete and schematic design has officially begun and is slated to be complete in June! Looking for every opportunity to leverage this work, our Board and Staff organized a tour with local government and nonprofits, including VITEMA, the VI Fire Department, the Department of Human Services, the Red Cross, and other entities that that oversee all of the territory’s disaster shelters to formalize our partnership as it relates to the Alexander Theater and to discuss its operation as not just a Disaster Safe Room (where people are sheltered for the 72 hours of the disaster event) but also its potential use as a secondary shelter, where people who cannot safely return to their homes are sheltered in the aftermath of a disaster. This is very important, as the functional needs of a secondary shelter differ from those of a safe room, and FEMA funding is limited to safe room functions.

Also in this past quarter, Mercy Corps selected the Sunday Market Square as a Resilience Hub site! This partnership will lead to the in-kind contribution of solar, potable water storage and filtration, communications, and a community food garden. Collaboration between SCF and Mercy Corps this quarter has included numerous meetings with our project team, architect, and Mercy Corps infrastructure team for early planning and integration into the schematic design process. Also, in May of 2024, SCF partnered with Mercy Corps to host a series of focus groups with local residents (one for women, one for men, and an upcoming session for youth) to explore issues and concerns related to disaster recovery and resilience. These focus groups generated incredible energy and feedback, with numerous community members expressing deep commitment to the project.

Ultimately, the Sunday Market Square will be home to more than just co-working spaces, low-income housing, a theater, and a Safe Room (and hopefully a Congregate Disaster Shelter). It will be a place for our young people to dream and to grow, for our nonprofits to collaborate and innovate – and it will reflect the ancestral wisdom, culture, and values of our People, honoring the African People who originally built the Square.

Where we are today represents thousands of hours spent by Foundation staff writing grants, nurturing strategic partnerships, shifting strategies due to changing government regulations, listening and looping back to our community members and nonprofits… and so very much more. The commitment and the passion that makes place-based work so impactful has and continues to be fully demonstrated through our successes to date. It also underscores the importance of strong, local civic organizations that are willing to take on multi-layered initiatives, the outcome of which is truly equity-centered, inclusive, and holds social justice as a steady North Star.

Looking to the Past to Inform the Territory’s Future Resilience
When it comes to resilience, a focus on child wellbeing is absolutely vital. As one of the most rapidly aging populations in the United States, the U.S. Virgin Islands’ child population has decreased by half in just 20 years. The implications of this data on every aspect of our future stability make the stakes very high for our children and every member of our community. And so, just this past April, St. Croix Foundation hosted its inaugural KIDS COUNT USVI Summit, entitled Answering the Call: We are the System and the Solution.

Another example of St. Croix Foundation's cross-sector initiatives, our KIDS COUNT USVI Summit was held in partnership with the Office of the Governor, convening a cohort of key stakeholders from the public, private, and civic sectors. Despite the dismal trends that caused the Foundation to issue a “Call to Action” in its 2023 KIDS COUNT USVI Data Book, our KIDS COUNT Team believes that the size of the Territory, and even our status, may be untapped opportunities to do things differently: to make radical and rapid strides in the area of child well-being.

The summit's overarching aim was to harness and activate the data presented in the annual USVI Data Book. It also sought to help stakeholders interrogate and identify their individual and collective roles in the life cycle of existing (and burgeoning) systems while building greater competency around collaboration and the co-creation of cohesive and coherent systems of support that improve the well-being of our Territory's children.

At the heart of the summit was an impactful video presentation titled "Sankofa," a term from Africa that means 'go back and fetch it.' This video offered a contemplative glimpse into the history of the Territory's children, spanning from the Pre-colonial Era to the Present. the video was intended to highlight the harrowing journey of the formerly enslaved inhabitants while also amplifying the progress that has been made despite the colonial backdrop of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The Summit was facilitated by internationally renowned systems change expert and founder of The Outside, Tuesday Rivera, who has led numerous communities through the deliberative and collaborative process of co-designing new ways of “doing” and “being,” which lead to radical systems change. A session was also led by Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen, formerly of Grantmakers for Education and author of The Future of Smart, who offered a compelling perspective on the American educational system, calling for a more human-centered approach that is adaptive to children’s needs and assets as social beings and is less linear and mechanistic than traditional methods.

Perhaps we can sum it up best through St. Croix Foundation’s President, Deanna James’ words: There are really no words to articulate how both transformational and inspirational the Summit was. Over the course of the Foundation’s 33 years of service, we have hosted a significant number of gatherings. But, this meeting was different. In fact, we made a bold decision to frame the summit as a Village Council Meeting, with guests representing not just executive directors, lawmakers, and leaders, but also Griots, Elders, and Allies - all armed with a multitude of tools, deep wisdom, and hopefully, the will to solve the complex social problems confronting our Children… together!

Resilience and the Future…
The deliberative and inclusive process that the Foundation is employing to convene our People around the future of our Place does not stop. We are and will continue to tirelessly explore, to learn, to share, and to open up space for every member of our community to engage. The stakes are high, and St. Croix Foundation continues to seek core and programmatic support that will allow us to sustain and deepen this work. We thank all of our partners, past and present – and future!

For more information about St. Croix Foundation’s CARE Fund, please contact us today.

Links:

"Sankofa: A Story of Our Children"

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Jan 22, 2024
Emergent Models of Holistic Community Resilience

By Lilli Cox | Dir. of Communications and Community Investments

In 2017, when Hurricanes Maria and Irma struck the U.S. Virgin Islands with devastating Cat 5 winds, St. Croix Foundation’s absolute priority was immediate relief for residents. But even as we coordinated a distribution channel for supplies and launched comprehensive grant programs for nonprofits to rebuild, we were keenly aware that natural disasters often exacerbate existing inequities for People who are unseen or dismissed.

Indeed, in the 6 years since the hurricanes, the cumulative effects of these inequities coupled with crippled infrastructure have brought our community to a pivotal tipping point, wherein nearly every aspect of life for our People is compromised. In addition to St. Croix’s school infrastructure still being crippled from the 2017 hurricanes, recent water and soil tests have found high levels of lead and heavy metals. Most challenging of all, our community’s primary healthcare infrastructure (in the form of the only public hospital on the island)has been condemned and has been replaced by a modular medical facility. And so it is that 2024 feels consequential. Because, while the issues we confront are multi-layered and complex, St. Croix Foundation’s work, collectively with our nonprofits and with support from GlobalGiving, is gaining traction.

Since we last reported, our team has been developing a program that empowers residents to understand the quality of their water and air. And, we’ve expanded our Healing Humanities Initiative even further with new partnerships, bringing new opportunities for holistic development rooted in and for our community. We also released our 2023 KIDS COUNT USVI Data Book, providing critical data on the condition of our children and their families which intersects with the territory’s future resilience on every front – from climate change to shifts in our population’s demographics.

Clear Minds and Clean Water

Today, although our community continues to face all of the same entrenched socio-economic challenges facing BIPOC communities around the nation - poverty, crumbling infrastructure, crime, and failing healthcare and education systems - over the past five years, these preexisting social vulnerabilities have been exacerbated by a succession of crises: two Category 5 Hurricanes (2017); COVID-19 (2020-Present), and the reopening of a polluting oil refinery (2021). New threats on our horizon now include a new finding of significant amounts of Lead and Copper in our public water supply.

The level of distress that so many residents have dealt with, (particularly those who don’t know how far-reaching this crisis is), has been tough to witness. Also, knowing that the territory didn’t see the same level of national philanthropic engagement as somewhere like Flint, makes this all the more isolating and complicated to navigate. Fortuitously, one national partner, the Panta Rhea Foundation, awarded a grant to our CARE Fund with which SCF and several of our Nonprofit Consortium partners are working together to expand lead testing efforts for vulnerable populations including at an independent living community.

New Partnerships and the Evolution of Holistic Community Development.

According to the former VI Humanities Council, “The humanities are a way of thinking about and responding to the world - as tools we use to examine and make sense of the human experience in general and our individual experiences in particular. The humanities enable us to reflect upon our lives and ask fundamental questions of value, purpose, and meaning rigorously and systemically.”

St. Croix Foundation’s comprehensive community development activities are rooted by that tenet and over the past quarter, several new national partners have deepened their commitment to and investment in SCF’s holistic community place-keeping agenda. One of those partners, the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York has not only invested in our project but has expanded its support to several of our Nonprofit Consortium Partners.

In the next quarter, we will be engaging a broad cross-section of our cultural arts community to help frame the conceptual design and utility of the space. Our Grand Vision for the project is to begin to reclaim a more complete story of our Place, to not only preserve the role that enslaved African bodies and minds played in the construction of edifices but, more intentionally, to discover what new narratives can be unearthed about who they were; and what skills and stories they possessed before enslavement. SCF also seeks to explore who the existing People of our Place can be in the future envisioned through the lens of the African Freeman and not the European Colonizer. Making those connections and building the bridges between the past and the future through the design and purposing of the properties in SMS is the exciting endeavor before us as we challenge all of our project partners to remain open to join us on an exploratory journey of Ancestral remembrance, revolution, and renaissance.

Creating a Case for Data and Our Community’s Children: Kids Count:

The Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Team released our 3rd KIDS COUNT Databook, during a well-attended virtual presentation. While the initial media coverage was limited as the release coincided with Holiday festivities, in the past two weeks, there has been substantial coverage and conversation about the Kids Count Report.

Resilience and the Future…

Our CARE Fund was initially established in response to the 2017 hurricanes, but when COVID-19 gripped the world amid our recovery from the storms, we made the CARE Fund a permanent fund that would support community-rooted resilience through grantmaking and targeted programming no matter what kind of storm. Today, as we work with our local nonprofits, government partners, and corporate citizens, we are mindful that resilience is directly proportional to the depth of relationships and connectivity across sectors that exist. Sustaining and evolving these relationships requires a central force of core support like our CARE Fund.

For more information on any of St. Croix Foundation’s CARE Fund

programming and grantmaking, please contact us directly.

Attachments:

CARE_Report_v1.2024.pdf (PDF)

1 Attachment

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Sep 17, 2023
KEEPING OUR PEOPLE AT THE CENTER

By Lilli Cox | Dir. Communications & Community Investments

Workforce Development for a Thriving St. Croix!

Today, as we write this report, we’re at the peak of hurricane season, and so we begin by sending our best wishes to all island and coastline communities facing the threat of these storms: may you have calm winds and peaceful seas.

It’s the threat of storms – figurative and literal – that keeps St. Croix Foundation hard at work, and this past quarter was no different. Every year, every month, a sense of urgency grows as electricity costs rise (we pay .43 cents a kwh!), the oceans warm, and political and national support remains uncertain. As we look back on all that we have accomplished through the CARE Fund – from Farm Tiendas to solarizing Community Centers and more – we know that we cannot be satisfied with recovery alone. We have to build our social and physical infrastructure stronger and better. To that end, we’ve been hosting federal program and grant partners, convening our nonprofit partners, and most importantly, we’ve been laser-focused on supporting the holistic and fair development of our Place after Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

This quarterly report centers on just two stories (of many) that demonstrate the power that comes with relationships and human-centered programs – whether grantmaking or massive capital projects. As always, we deeply appreciate GlobalGiving’s partnership. You have been a consistent presence throughout a long recovery, and we couldn’t have reached this critical point without you.

Grantmaking through Place-Based Strategies
In our last report, we told you about a small, but mighty CARE Grant that St. Croix Foundation awarded to our local vocational school, the Career and Technical Education Center (CTEC). The objective was to provide direct support to their nationally accredited National Center for Construction Education & Research (NCCER) electrical course – and today we have news that is testimony to what grantmaking through a place-based, community-rooted strategy can achieve.

Mid-way through the grant period, just four months after receiving a $7,000 CARE Grant, the NCCER course instructor has reported he has leveraged the grant to directly benefit 40 young people, stretching supplies to meet the needs of students in courses even outside of the electrical course.

Seated in such proximity to our community – to our People – makes high-impact grantmaking like this possible. We know our principals, our instructors, and our students – and we know our Community Assets, like CTEC!

Measuring impact beyond a number or dollar can sometimes be a challenge, so perhaps the instructor’s words will say it best:

“For the first time in four years, the electrical class has the proper tools and materials for trainees to be successful in accomplishing their training tasks. Trainees will gain real life experience in addition to knowledge and understanding of residential and commercial wiring in this rigorous curriculum. I can stand proudly in my classroom and feel confident in knowing that greater things will be accomplished this school year as trainees have access to all the supplies and materials needed to be successful.”

While undoubtedly this is a major achievement, St. Croix Foundation is mindful of the need for consistent support. Challenges around access to textbooks continue, for example, and the need to scale workforce development around clean energy is ever-present. At the Foundation, we can’t help but imagine what another holistic, collaborative grant opportunity for those on the frontlines of resilience could do, and we continue to identify funding for a comprehensive round of CARE Grants.

Taking “Recovery” and “Resilience” to the Next Level: A Humanitarian Approach to Place-Keeping!
In many ways, the U.S. Virgin Islands, like many island communities who live on the frontlines of climate change, environmental justice, and natural disasters, are in a persistent state of recovery. As such, resilience is something that we already possess – or we would cease to exist.

So, for all of us at the Foundation, we believe that we must do more than just “recover” – in fact, we believe that we must move beyond words like resilience and literally build new systems, rooted in the history, culture, and assets of our People and Place.

Today, we are delighted to report on our Healing Humanities Initiative, which is grounded in our commitment to holistic community resilience and is now officially underway thanks to several federal grants. As an extension of our Alexander Theater Restoration project, our Healing Humanities Initiative will be centered in Historic Sunday Market Square as a designated arts corridor which will include intentionally designed nonprofit co-working spaces, affordable housing, and commercial spaces.

Moving into the architecture and design phase of the project, our Healing Humanities initiative is so deeply aligned with the Foundation’s commitment to holistic community development. Our focus is steadfast: community-rooted planning, implementation, and meeting federal compliance requirements for our FEMA grant to restore the Alexander Theater into a safehouse for 300+ people. Now, the Foundation is actively working to secure $2 million in critical funding to support unfunded project components that the federal resources will not cover.

Continuing on…
At the Foundation, we are practical and pragmatic – but we are also optimists at our core. While we may be isolated and because of our size, dismissed or unseen by most, we are also small enough to wrap our arms around the really big problems of today. We are excited about the potential to do just that – and every day, with the help of our people and our nonprofit and public sector partners, we see mental models shift, innovation emerges, and new systems born. It’s not quick. It’s not linear. It’s what happens when you sit in place and put people at the center.

For more information on any of St. Croix Foundation’s CARE Fund programming and grantmaking, please contact us – and thank you for seeing us!

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