For small nonprofits, the hardest money to raise isn’t for programs. It’s for rent, internet and keeping the lights on.
That’s what makes the $100,000 grant Team Wilderness received from Newport’s 40th anniversary event last week so valuable, said Steve Cunningham, the group’s founder and executive director.
“Operational funds are the hardest funds to come by, by far,” Cunningham said. “Many grants and sources of funding are extremely restricted and can only be used on things directly related to programming. And unfortunately, a lot of times they see things like rent or internet or keeping the lights on is not related to programming.”
Flexible money for those costs, he said, “allows you, in the end, to actually help grow programming even more.”
For a group Team Wilderness’ size, the award is significant. Juan Melli, the organization’s president, said its budget is a little more than half a million dollars a year.
“This is a big deal for us,” Melli said. “It’s significant, and it makes a huge impact for us.”
Team Wilderness was one of four “cornerstone” recipients, the largest awards among the 40 Jersey City nonprofits that received a share of the $2 million the LeFrak and Simon families gave last week.
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Team Wildnerness grew out of a classroom.
Cunningham was teaching history at Snyder High School in Jersey City when his students teased him for going hiking. He set out to prove they’d love it. They did, and the hiking club grew so big that it even rappelled off the roof of the school building, which Cunningham called “an interesting battle to get that going.”
That club became a summer program, then a year-round organization built around what families said they needed. Today it offers therapy, academic coaching and after-school programs, and all of it includes the outdoors. Every child who receives free monthly therapy also goes on a hike with their counselor.
In its first summer, Team Wilderness served 24 young people, Cunningham said in a video shown at the event. Now it supports more than 600 a year across Jersey City, Hoboken, Bayonne and Newark, mostly middle and high school students. It has recently begun supporting students into their first two years of college.
The mission, Melli said, is to close what’s called the “nature gap,” the obstacles, from transportation to history, that keep many urban kids from getting outdoors.
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The payoff shows up on the trail.
Kids who arrive asking how they’ll ever get up a mountain are shocked when they reach the top, Cunningham said. He told the story of Tyler, a boy who was terrified to rappel. When he reached the bottom, he called home: “I was terrified, but I did it.”
The programs range from kayaking and rappelling off waterfalls to summer backpacking trips in the Catskills. A photography club teaches kids to shoot, edit and exhibit their work, then sell the prints and keep the profits.
“So, they learn the business side of it too,” Melli said.
The group does it all with three or four full-time staffers and several part-timers.
Melli said the grant isn’t really about the money.
“The funding is not about the funding,” he said. “It’s a means to the end, and it gives us the confidence that we can do the programming that we need, that we can continue it.”
Thanks to the LeFrak and Simon families, they can.
