Non-profits agencies which want to participate can submit requests for proposals on September 25th.
Frederick, Md (KM) The Unity Campaign for Frederick County is scheduled to begin on March 5th, 2025. Erin Lawson, Director of Development and Marketing, and Director of the Unity Campaign, says it’s a community-wide effort to bring non-profit agencies together to support ALICE households. ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. Lawson says individuals from these household have difficulty affording the basic necessities of life.
“Everyone operates a little bit differently. We all come together at this one time of year to collectively ask the community to support the 32 percent of households who struggle to afford the basic cost of living here in Frederick,”: says Lawson.
Lawson says the number of ALICE households is about 32 percent of the community for 2023 and 2024, which is a drop from 36 percent the previous years. “So that equates to about 33,000 households here in our community that cannot meet that basic cost of living,” she says. “So we’re trying to figure out what that decrease looks like. Is it the programming that we’re offering from our non-profit community here in Frederick County? We certainly hope that that’s having an impact on lowering that number.”
She says it could also be that some of these families are moving away from Frederick due to the high cost of living.
The Unity Campaign may be months away, but Lawson says non-profit organizations can submit their requests for proposals starting on Wednesday, September 25th. “We have a review committee of about five, that looks at all the applications and makes recommendations to our board to let folks in,” Lawson says “We typically tale between 30 to 35 organizations each year.”
She says some of the non-profits that have participated in the past are Blessings in a Backpack, Children of Incarcerated Parents, Farms to Schools Frederick, Helping Hands and Caring Hearts and the Hurwitz Breast Cancer Fund.
During the Unity Campaign from March 5th through 19th, 2025, residents can make contributions to the participating non-profits. “The Unity Campaign is a great time to give if there’s a non-profit that’s close to your heart, or you if you want to support the overall ALICE community, the Unity Campaign is perfect for that,” says Lawson
And each gift to a non-profit will go even further. “Every gift that is collected during the Unity Campaign is matched, particularly about a 10 percent match on each gift,” she says. “So it really helps to amplify gifts in the community and then stretch a little further when they go out to each non-profit.”
The deadline for non-profits to submit their requests for proposals is October 18th, 2024.
By Kevin McManus