You may recall that in 2024, Parents as Teachers implemented a $1.8 million Challenge Grant cycle, awarding 62 grants to affiliates across the United States to fund community projects that their stretched budgets wouldn’t cover.
One year of hard work later, these remarkable projects demonstrate what can happen when ingenuity, resources, and motivation intersect. In a recent episode of the newly launched Parents as Teachers podcast, two grantees shared updates with Chief Program Officer Kerry Caverly, who oversaw the grant process.
Cori Silvey of Changing Tides, Helping Hands and her home visitor Shallee Moss in Suquamish, Washington applied the funding to an inaugural conference centered around community and support for Indigenous parents and caretakers in their tribal community.
“We came with so much intention and so much excitement, and our community 100% matched our energy for those two days,” Silvey said in the podcast. “It was beautiful. And since then, we’ve had several requests to find funding to make it happen each year.”
Participants engaged in imaginative conversations about what they desire for their children and grandchildren, discussed trauma, laughed and cried, and shared important stories.
And the impact doesn’t stop there.
“As much as I would love to be in every home working with every family, that’s not my capacity right now, and so I rely on the parents who attended our event to keep those stories alive and to keep sharing what can be and what was,” Silvey said.
Significant partnerships established with other community service organizations during the event have also been sustained since, giving community members the assurance of connecting with care they know has been “approved” by someone they trust.
The process of Silvey’s ideation and planning highlights one key aspect of the success that many of the grantees share: deep awareness of the needs of the community and insightful solutions to meet those needs.
“I’ve learned that when affiliates are given flexibility and can write grants that fit their needs with minimal constraints, amazing things can happen,” said Caverly, who interviewed Silvey in the podcast.
Julie Rains of Valley Center School District in Kansas, who was also interviewed, turned a discontinued bus from the Department of Transportation into a book buggy to quite literally bring literacy into her community. Another grantee, Caverly noted, assessed that an employee vehicle could be the unexpected solution to reducing workforce turnover in their area of service and applied for the funds to implement it.
In fact, needs and solutions could cover a wide range of topics, including:
-Combatting Maternal and Infant Mortality
-Family Leadership Development
-Workforce Development
-Program Quality Improvement
-Enrollment/Recruiting
-Community Responsiveness
-PBS Engagement
And the most exciting news: initiated by the Parents as Teachers Board of Directors as a singular event, these grants will now continue with a total of $500,000 annually for five years, thanks to Enterprise Mobility’s incredible investment in the organization. In fact, the 2025 Challenge Grant Awards were announced in April!
Celebrate with us as these new award winners kick off another cycle of incredible work. And stay tuned for updates as we check in on the ways they transform the lives of the children and families in their communities.
And don’t forget to listen to the full conversation between Cori Silvey, Julie Rains, and Kerry Caverly – there’s a well of inspiration and education to discover in the half hour they shared together!