The BSA Receives a Cummings Grant to Support Youth Programming
The BSA Foundation is proud to announce that we are one of 130 Massachusetts nonprofits to receive a 2020 grant through the Cummings $20 Million Grant Program, to strengthen our support of children, communities, and cities through architecture and design.
The grant enables us to expand our youth education program for K-8 programming, hiring an additional educator and thereby increasing our reach from one to four Boston Public Schools. This expansion means reaching nearly 700 additional students, teaching them how to evaluate and synthesize information, how to collaborate, and how to use creative problem-solving techniques when confronted with real-world dilemmas. These skills make students better prepared for school and the workforce, and BSA helps Boston Public Schools work to ensure that opportunities to develop these skills are readily available to all Boston students.
BSA’s youth programming has been an important part of the Foundation’s mission for more than two decades. It offers opportunities for children and their families to discover how to use the power of design to make their communities safer, stronger, and fairer. Our programming includes family and youth design workshops, job shadowing days, and collaborations with Boston Public Schools and other youth education providers. We work with students from kindergarten through high school, seeking to close gaps in opportunity and access for our city’s young people.
Our youth programming raises awareness and appreciation of architecture and design to children who may have never heard of it; allows architects to teach design thinking and collaboration; and assists Boston Public Schools with meeting its goal of introducing students at an early age to professionals who can demonstrate a wide variety of life and career opportunities.
The Cummings $20 Million Grant Program supports Massachusetts nonprofits that are based in and primarily serve Middlesex, Essex, and Suffolk counties. Through this place-based initiative, Cummings Foundation aims to give back in the area where it owns commercial buildings, all of which are managed, at no cost to the Foundation, by its affiliate, Cummings Properties.
This year’s diverse group of grant recipients represents a wide variety of causes spread across 40 different cities and towns, and most will receive their grants over two to five years.
The complete list of 130 grant winners is available at CummingsFoundation.org.
