The Light House is excited to announce that it has been awarded a $20,000 Anne Arundel Women Giving Together (AAWGT) Family Assistance Program Grant. This grant will provide funding for the comprehensive Light House programs available for homeless families, families at risk of homelessness and homeless individuals working to reconnect with their children to promote long-term self-sufficiency.

Since 1989, The Light House has been serving the most vulnerable men, women and children in our community, and we are deeply grateful to AAWGT for being a crucial partner in these efforts for over a decade now. Last year, thanks to the generosity of partners like AAWGT, our residential program provided emergency and transitional housing for 257 individuals and 15 families, including 26 children. We also successfully stabilized 603 households through our Safe Harbour Resource Center, which serves neighbors who are unsheltered, chronically homeless, or at risk of homelessness.

To celebrate the 2020 grantees, AAWGT held a Virtual Grants Showcase on September 9th, featuring Light House Executive Director, Jo Ann Mattson and other grantees who shared information about the important work their organizations are doing in our community. During the Grants Showcase, Mattson stated “Homelessness, while unrelentingly difficult for adults, is particularly traumatic for children. Funding from AAWGT for our Light House Family Services Program stops this painful cycle in its tracks and provides the necessary support to ensure that children are able to build a healthy foundation for a stable life. With the devastating effects of the pandemic, our services have been more important than ever. Through this crisis we have continued to provide the shelter, food, basic needs and case management services our community so desperately needs. The generosity of partner like AAWGT is what allows us to be front line crisis support for families and children during this difficult time.”

About Anne Arundel Women Giving Together (AAWGT): AAWGT was founded in 2006 to improve the quality of life for women and families in Anne Arundel County by providing grants to local nonprofit organizations. AAWGT works to stand behind and support women whose lives are negatively impacted by poverty, lack of opportunity, violence, and structural and systemic injustice. AAWGT supports initiatives that improve the quality of life for women and families in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, through grantmaking, engaging and educating women donors around issues affecting women and families in the community and about philanthropy, and through collective philanthropy. To learn more visit www.givingtogether.org.