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A major investment from the Delaware Community Foundation is helping more than three dozen organizations expand services for Hispanic communities across the First State, supporting everything from early childhood literacy and workforce development to arts and cultural programming.
Through its Arsht-Cannon Fund, the foundation awarded $650,000 to 39 projects this year — an increase of $80,000 from last year and the largest number of projects funded through the initiative to date.
The grant will support organizations working in education, health, workforce development, advocacy and community collaboration, reflecting the growing needs and diversity of Delaware’s Latino population.
“Usually, we tend to focus on developmental programming, literacy, health-related programming,” said Jennifer Fuqua, director of community partnerships and Hispanic initiatives at the foundation. “And more recently, we’ve also focused more on workforce and economic development as well as advocacy and collaboration across Delaware.”
For more than two decades, the foundation has invested in nonprofit organizations serving Hispanic Delawareans. This year, funding will support long-standing literacy initiatives, multilingual programming and, for the first time, Reach Out and Read, a program that distributes bilingual books to children during routine well-visits from infancy through age 5.
“We have some long-time partners who do community and family literacy programs, community [English as a second language programs] up and down the state, making different types of programming and materials available that are in multiple languages,” Fuqua said. “Those are some things that we did this year.”
She said these grants come at a time when many nonprofits are navigating financial uncertainty as they try to still meet the needs of multilingual families.
Delaware Art Museum to expand bilingual access
Among this year’s recipients is the Delaware Art Museum, which received a $20,000 grant to continue expanding access for Spanish-speaking visitors through bilingual interpretation, cultural programming and new community initiatives.
Executive Director Molly Giordano said the funding allows the museums to continue building on years of intentional outreach.
“The Delaware Museum is really grateful to be a recipient of a few of their grants, including their most recent round of funding, and this is to help us move forward in a phased approach to translating parts of the [children’s] museum, and then a lot of our really popular vibrant cultural programming that we do here,” she said. “We need to translate labels and different texts at the museum. We need to really think long term about how we can serve a Spanish-speaking population better.”
