NORTHAMPTON – More than 60 organizations in the city will receive a portion of $4 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to be divvied up by the city, based on recommendations made last week by Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra.

The mayor designated the funds last year to help the Northampton community recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as loss of income from the economic fallout or improve access to health care. An advisory committee oversaw the application process and made recommendations on the grant awards. Recommendations were based on a survey conducted in 2021 regarding the needs of the community as a result of the pandemic.

Of the 98 applicants who applied, roughly two-thirds received funding. 

“This was in recognition of how hard the pandemic has been on the communities, businesses, nonprofits, arts and culture organizations and of course, the increase in needed support around housing,” said Sciarra at last Thursday’s City Council meeting. “I really want to thank the committee who worked extremely hard on this process to make it as accessible and equitable as possible, and I’m also very grateful for the hard work I know they did to come to their recommendations.”

Three organizations, Clinical and Support Options, Community Action Pioneer Valley and the Northampton Survival Center, each received $450,000, the highest amount awarded among all the grants.

CSO intends to use the money to support its shelter services in Northampton, while the Survival Center will use the funds to maintain services due to the ongoing impacts of the pandemic for the next two to three years. 

The grant for Community Action is to go toward overseeing the operations of the city’s proposed Community Resilience Hub, a multipurpose community center. The city purchased the former First Baptist Church building at 298 Main St. in December  and intends to convert the space into the resilience hub.  

Four other grants totaling $1 million-plus will go toward housing and shelter, the highest combined total. Food insecurity groups received the second highest, receiving nearly another quarter of the funds. 

Of the 61 grants that the city handed out, 22 went to arts-based organizations, 10 went to nonprofits, and six went to support small businesses. Fifteen of the grants will fund projects that seek to reduce transmission of COVID-19, such as an air filtration systems for nonprofits ServiceNet and the International Language Institute. Three grants were awarded to LGBTQ-related projects, such as health care center Transhealth. 

Council Vice President Karen Foster, who served on the advisory committee for distributing the funds, thanked those who applied and said the committee had spent hours discussing which projects would get funding, and for how much.  

“As a nonprofit director, I know what it’s like to have projects funded and what it’s like to have projects not funded,” said Foster, who serves as the director of All Out Adventures, an outdoor recreation organization. “There were really some tremendous, worthy projects that we were not able to support and it wasn’t really anything about the application. It was about the priorities that the community had expressed through that survey, unlimited funds and trying to do the very best we could with that.” 

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.

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