This spring, we invited Wake County nonprofits and grassroots organizations to apply for a new, three-year funding opportunity. We’re hoping to help these new partners build a community of practice, elevate capacity and gain new skills through this grant. 

We recently kicked off our work with the four exceptional organizations that were selected to participate in our 2024 capacity building cohort! We’re sharing more about each organization below. 

Alice Aycock Poe Center for Health Education (The Poe Center)

The Poe Center team works directly with North Carolina children and families, providing unique health education in a fun, engaging way. From hosting field trips to leading training programs, the team helps kids learn everything from how to deal with stress to building healthy habits. The Poe Center has worked with more than 1.3 million participants since it opened in 1991! The team shared that this capacity building grant is a great way to incorporate an even bigger focus on social and emotional learning into the nonprofit’s work. 

Raleigh Little Theatre (RLT)

RLT is a welcoming community that uses theater to engage volunteers, students and audiences of all ages. The organization has served the community for more than 80 years! RLT knows that engaging with the arts can have a profound impact on children’s social emotional health. The team has increased their focus on serving youth since they launched their Education Program almost 40 years ago. Through this capacity building grant, the RLT team is excited to learn alongside peers – and to have a space to share struggles, successes and strategies together. 

SAFEchild 

SAFEchild believes that every child has the right to grow up without experiencing abuse and neglect – and works hard to make this dream a reality. As a matter of fact, the team served more than 16,246 children and caregivers in the 2023 fiscal year alone! The SAFEchild team knew that this cohort would be an opportunity to work collaboratively with other organizations in this space. They shared that through this three-year engagement, they hope to continue to build equity and social justice practices and behaviors into everything SAFEchild does. 

The LGBT Center of Raleigh (LGBTCoR)

LGBTCoR serves, empowers and advocates for the well-being of North Carolina’s diverse LGBTQ+ communities. It’s the only LGBT Center in Wake County – and one of the few in central North Carolina. Its youth programs include ASPYRE camp, Drag Story Hour of the Triangle, youth coffeehouse, TransGens and more. Through this cohort, LGBTCoR hopes to learn from partner organizations, from understanding the best outreach methods for hard-to-reach populations, to how their peers center racial justice in programming and how to grow at a sustainable pace.

We’ll work closely in partnership with these organizations, and with Emerging Equity, over the next three years! 

“At Emerging Equity, we believe in offering our partners the opportunity to ‘move at the speed of trust.’ Through this grant, our partners will have the time and space needed to build that trust. Together, we’ll focus on incorporating even more equity, strategy and collaboration into their work,” the Emerging Equity team shared. “We know that this kind of capacity building has a long-term, positive impact on our community overall. That’s why we’re so excited to get started with these incredible partners!”

These organizations have all exhibited a deep commitment to equity, learning and, of course, children’s social emotional health. We were inspired not only by their work to date, but also by the visions and goals they shared with us.  

Please join us in celebrating these organizations as they begin this cohort. And stay tuned! We’ll be sharing more about our collective journeys, hopes and learnings along the way.