VCU and Community Partners Awarded $190,000 Jessie Ball duPont Fund Grant to Reduce Intergenerational Poverty

By Mike Porter

The Jessie Ball duPont Fund has awarded a $190,580 grant to Virginia Commonwealth University on behalf of a coalition of several VCU educational units and Richmond groups working to prevent and reduce poverty in the Richmond region.

The three-year grant will be used to create a VCU-United Way Financial Stability Alliance to develop a systematic and comprehensive approach for reducing poverty in the Richmond area. The effort is an extension of a planning grant from an earlier duPont Fund grant that assessed the needs and opportunities for collaborations in the Richmond region.

In addition to the United Way, community partners have been The Community Foundation Serving Richmond and Petersburg, the Greater Richmond Earned Income Tax Coalition and New Visions New Ventures.

The alliance is working to expand the capacity of existing Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) organizations to provide free tax preparation services to low-income residents, while also linking them to asset building organizations and services in the area and evaluating the impact of the effort, according to Anthony J. Mallon, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Social Work and principal investigator of the effort.

“It’s an excellent example of a community-university partnership designed to address a pressing need,” Mallon said. “This initiative involves multiple units within the university – the School of Social Work, the School of Business, the Department of Mass Communication and the Division of Community Engagement as well as several service organizations located across the Richmond-Petersburg area.”

The DuPont Fund grant also will support the implementation of a service-learning course in tax preparation, the development of an annual daylong “financial stability fair” to kick off tax season and the creation of annual community forums to discuss project outcomes.

The Jessie Ball duPont Fund is a national philanthropic foundation that offers financial awards to promote community problem solving and accountability, asset-building and the independent sector.