How the Jolley Foundation is responding to the Covid-19 crisis
United Way Covid-19 Community Relief Fund
The Foundation was a charter contributor to United Way of Greenville County’s Covid-19 Community Relief Fund. This Relief Fund is providing grants to nonprofits addressing food insecurity, homelessness, child care for essential workers, and other urgent needs. The Fund is also working closely with Greenville County Schools in an effort to fill any gaps in food distribution the school district and community identify.
CommunityWorks Covid-19 Loan Funds
We know small businesses/nonprofits and low-income individuals are prime targets for predatory lenders, and this will only become more true as businesses struggle to survive. The Foundation made a program-related investment in funds created by CommunityWorks and Self Help Credit Union (local lenders certified to work with people who don’t qualify for mainstream banks). These Covid-19 Relief lines of credit provide low or no-interest loans to nonprofit organizations and small businesses as well as consumer loans for individuals.
Our investment will be used as a loan loss reserve, to protect CommunityWorks, Self Help, and the borrowers themselves. CommunityWorks will help connect nonprofits and small businesses to available federal relief funding, but will also have funds available to support those that don’t qualify for federal relief.
Support for Greenville’s Nonprofit Sector
We reached out to all our current grantees and removed any restrictions on our funding, so that they can use our grant if needed to keep the lights on and people paid, rather than reserve it for a specific project or initiative.
We also reassured all current and past grantees that we are not pulling back our funding for this year, but instead have committed to make grants at roughly the same level as we’ve done the past couple of years. We’ll conduct the spring grant cycle on an accelerated basis, to make grants available by the end of April, then will see what the summer brings in terms of how best to use the Foundation’s resources.
To help address food insecurity in the under-resourced southern part of Greenville County, we have partnered with another family foundation to provide seed funding to a nonprofit to produce up to 3,000 meals daily for residents of Belle Meade and surrounding neighborhoods, until state funding for after-school food programs resumes in the summer.
We know that churches often are the first place people turn for help. We provided support to three churches — two historically African-American, one founded to serve people experiencing homelessness — in whose leaders we have high confidence.
Next Generation Grantees
Each year the younger members of the Jolley family are able to nominate nonprofits in their own communities for small grants from the Foundation. We are providing additional unrestricted grants to each of these “Next Generation” grantees, in recognition of the important work they are doing in their home communities.