J.Team Gives $8,600 in Grants, Applications Due June 30

The J.Team high school students made their annual grant presentations at a year-end event on June 12, 2011. This year, eight organizations will receive a total $8,600.

Organizations who received grants are: Sports For All, Ultimate Peace, Camp Scholarships, Leket Israel, FareStart, Save a Child's Heart, Treehouse, and Kiva. See below for full details.

The 28 members of J.Team evaluated proposals from ten organizations, selecting these groups to receive the funding.

"We are very proud of these teenagers for the responsible and thoughtful way they evaluated the possible grantees," said Marla Goldberg, J.Team Program Manager. "We are looking forward to a celebration of their achievements."

Do you have a teenager who is interested in their community? Do you know a high school student for whom philanthropy is an important value? J.Team might be just the program for them!

J.Team is the Jewish Federation's teen philanthropy program for high school-aged teens. A year-long commitment, the participants learn how to select an organization for funding consideration, how to research and evaluate funding requests, and then make decisions as a team that result in the teens making grants.

Applications for the 2011-2012 J.Team are now open, and are due on June 30.

For an application, or additional information, click here.

Jewish Camp Scholarships
The Camp Scholarship Program is designed to help families in Washington State who cannot afford the cost of camp tuition. Jewish overnight camps provide the opportunity for kids of all ages to explore their Jewish identity and to mature, gain independence, develop confidence, learn social skills and explore personal interests.

Leket Israel
Leket Israel is the largest food bank and food rescue network in Israel. Their goal is to alleviate the problem of nutritional insecurity through the rescue and redistribution of excess food to benefit Israel's needy. In 2010, Leket salvaged surplus food supplies from 300 farms and 200 food producers to the tune of 700,000 hot meals, 90,000 loaves of bread and 11.5 million pounds of produce and other manufactured perishables. Rescued food is redistributed to nearly 300 Israeli non-profits serving those in need.

Kline Galland Home
The Caroline Kline Galland Home is a 205-bed, state-of-the-art, skilled nursing facility located on the shores of Lake Washington. Fully licensed and recognized as one of the finest skilled nursing facilities in the country, the Home provides a full complement of medical services, enhanced social, religious and cultural programs, strictly kosher meals and a loving Jewish environment.

FareStart
FareStart provides a community that transforms lives by empowering homeless and disadvantaged men and women to achieve self-sufficiency through life skills, job training and employment in the food service industry. This program helps people help themselves, by rehabilitating them and providing them with a solid education.

Treehouse
The mission of Treehouse is to give youth in foster care a childhood and a future. By allowing foster youth to participate in extracurricular arts and athletics, The Little Wishes Program helps them enjoy fun activities in childhood and develop important skills for adult life.

Kiva
Kiva is the world's first personal micro-lending website that empowers individuals to participate in poverty alleviation directly, and effectively. People can fund these loans on the Kiva site by adding as little as $25 to back the loan for these entrepreneurs.
As the borrower repays the loan, the Kiva Lenders are repaid as well. With these funds, they can then choose to reinvest in another entrepreneur, or withdraw their money.

Lower 9th Ward
The Lower 9th Ward Village is a community-driven, community-led, organization and neighborhood center based in the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana. The main goal of the Village is to bring together the entire Lower 9th Ward to empower community members to be self-sufficient and to sustain an equitable quality of life. The Village focuses on connecting the elderly and youth with services and on providing care and guidance from the community as a whole.

Save a Child's Heart
Save a Child's Heart (SACH) is an Israeli-based international humanitarian project, whose mission is to improve the quality of pediatric cardiac care for children from developing countries who suffer from heart disease and to create centers of competence in these countries.

Sport for All
Sport for All is an ongoing soccer sports league for the moshavim and kibbutzim of the Hof Ashkelon Region in Israel, part of Seattle's Partnership community, that was initiated by teens from the rural area. This program was created in order to bring the teens from the entire region together and give them a positive free time program so that they would do something constructive and not get into trouble. Today, the program serves over 300 teens from the region and is one of the most successful teen programs ever created in Hof Ashkelon.

Ultimate Peace
Ultimate Peace builds bridges of friendship and understanding for youth from different social and cultural backgrounds around the world. Its Middle East program brings together hundreds of youth representing the diversity in the region - Arab Israeli, Palestinian, and Israeli Jews. It focuses on fun and education, not politics, using the exhilarating and character building sport of Ultimate Frisbee as its primary tool. They create opportunities for youth from disparate backgrounds to play and learn Ultimate Frisbee together, helping them discover commonalities which enable them to become not only teammates but friends as well.