BETTENDORF, IOWA (January 8, 2024) — What a joy it is to start the day by announcing that this year’s Quad Cities Community Foundation Transformation Grant has been awarded to the Martin Luther King Jr Center to support their West End Revitalization efforts in Rock Island. The three-year, $300,000 grant will ensure this community-driven initiative has the capacity to succeed and eventually act as a model for other neighborhoods and cities.
Our Transformation Grants are funded directly by donor contributions to our Quad Cities Community Impact Fund. The grant is awarded yearly to organizations that are driving big change in our community. I know the MLK Center has the leadership, knowledge, and vision to create real, lasting change with the help of this grant. I’d like to share why our board of directors has chosen this powerful project for a Transformation Grant.
The West End Revitalization initiative was launched in 2022. From its beginning, the project has been informed by an inclusive and participatory community-based strategy. The goal is to build wealth, power, and livability for Rock Island’s West End community, which has long contained some of the most distressed census areas in our region.
This initiative unites neighbors, non-profits, and government agencies, relying heavily on collaboration. The revitalization envisions better sidewalks, greater broadband access, more affordable housing, entrepreneurial investment, and much more.
The MLK Center, under the leadership of Jerry Jones, has organized the effort through an approach called collective impact and with the help of a steering committee made up of seven community members with a range of lived and professional experiences: teachers, non-profit workers, and people working in immigrant and senior communities, to name a few. Collective impact is a model that gets groups organized and working together — it prevents a project from getting siloed by a single perspective.
The steering committee will present a phased project proposal to the city in early 2024.
Since 2015, our Transformation Grants have invested more than $1.5 million in local non-profit organizations. The grants are unique in that they provide unrestricted funding. This means that organizations will have great capacity and flexibility as the project develops.
Our lives are all connected in the Quad Cities. The generosity of our donors has made this grant possible. In the coming years, it’s going to create real change that will improve lives in the West End and ripple through the entire region.
Sue Hafkemeyer is President and CEO of the Quad Cities Community Foundation.
