Interfaith Community Services received a $160,000 grant to provide services and support to clients hit hard by COVID-19, including food. | Adobe Stock
Interfaith Community Services received a $160,000 grant to provide services and support to clients hit hard by COVID-19, including food. | Adobe Stock
A nonprofit group of faith communities that is “overwhelmed” with families needing help because of COVID-19 is among six sharing grants totaling $1 million awarded through the San Diego COVID-19 Community Response Fund at The San Diego Foundation.
Interfaith Community Services was awarded $160,000 to serve people in the North County Inland area, The San Diego Foundation said in a January release.
The fund makes rolling rapid-response grants to nonprofits so that they can help people “disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences,” the foundation said.
Interfaith Community Services CEO Greg Anglea said in the virtual press conference hosted by The San Diego Foundation that when the coronavirus pandemic “hit,” the nonprofit experienced a “nearly 500% increase in families and individuals requesting support with food and basic needs assistance.”
Established in 1979, Interfaith Community Services helped more than 20,000 people last year with “food, employment, housing, mental health services, addiction counseling, shelter and access to health care,” Anglea said.
The grant from the San Diego COVID-19 Community Response Fund will help Interfaith Community Services assist people such as the single mother raising a child with disabilities who lost her restaurant job and received help with rent from an earlier grant Interfaith received from the foundation, Anglea said.
“She was facing a rent bill that she couldn’t pay, and she knew that while evictions are on hold, those bills will come due,” Anglea said. “With the help of The San Diego Foundation, we were able to help her to not only get current with her rent but identify a job that fit her skills and also help her lower her educational expenses.”
Other nonprofits receiving grants were SAY (Social Advocates for Youth) San Diego, $140,000 (North County Central); Metropolitan Area Advisory Committee on Anti-Poverty (MAAC), $150,000 (North County Coastal); International Rescue Committee, $150,000 (East County); South Bay Community Services, $180,000 (South County); City Heights Community Development Corporation, $220,000 (Central), the press release said.
Alerts Sign-up