Hudson praises Delaware Community Foundation
State Rep. Deborah D. Hudson, R-Fairthorne, recently announced her efforts to improve a system by which individual donations to assist children’s organizations are distributed in Delaware are finally paying off.
Under legislation Hudson sponsored last year, the Delaware Community Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides grants to various humanitarian causes throughout the state, has awarded $37,000 in grants to children’s organizations in all three counties. The money had originally been donated to the now-defunct Children’s Trust Fund, to which taxpayers were able to contribute when filing their state income tax returns. Hudson sponsored House Bill 334, which eliminated the Children’s Trust Fund completely and, subsequently, the tax check-off option, after she learned that money that had been donated to the fund was not being given to the cause for which it was intended. She learned that the fund had no board of directors and had not been functioning since 2004.
The funds that had been collected up until last year were being held by the Delaware Division of Revenue until the agency received instructions on how to distribute the contributions. The legislation required that the $37,000 in contributions be given to the Delaware Community Foundation, which, in turn, provided the grants. The foundation’s grants committee recently awarded grants to the following organizations: Child Inc., Children & Families First, Children’s Advocacy Center of Delaware, Elizabeth W. Murphey School, Survivors of Abuse in Recovery, and West End Neighborhood House.
Committee members included Vivian Rapposelli, secretary of the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families; the Hon. Stephen Lamb, former Chancery Court Judge; Wendy Danner, New Castle County attorney; Bianca Fraser-Johnson from Bank of America; Mary Hickok from Wilmington Trust; Denise Schwartz from the Swank Foundation and Carolyn Bray of Sussex County.
Hudson said, “My entire goal was to make sure the money that had been donated in good faith to assist children in Delaware was, indeed, getting to the cause for which it was intended. I am thrilled to learn that the Delaware Community Foundation has done its due diligence in determining which organizations are the most deserving of the funds in order to use the grants to better the lives of children they serve on daily basis. I could not have asked for a better outcome in this situation.”
According to Fred Sears, president and CEO of the Delaware Community Foundation, “The DCF is pleased to have been selected by the Delaware State Legislature to disburse the remaining funds from the Delaware Children’s Trust Fund through the same selection process we use when we make our own grants every year. We were happy to work on the state’s behalf to award these grants to deserving community-based agencies delivering child abuse prevention services.”
