Cummings Foundation: Thank You for the Last Four Years!

Friends from the Cummings Foundation visited Casa Myrna’s Teen Parenting Program in January 2019.

In 2015, Cummings Foundation honored Casa Myrna by awarding us a $100,0000 grant over four years under their $100K for 100 grant program. Cummings Foundation’s support has been transformational for our organization and the domestic violence survivors we serve. In addition to providing critical resources for Casa Myrna’s comprehensive shelter and trauma-informed supportive services for survivors, funding support  from Cummings Foundation helped us to restructure existing programs and seed innovative new initiatives in response to community needs.

Thanks to their generosity, the last four years have been an exciting period of growth in our programming, collaborative partnerships, and staffing.

Here are only a few of the accomplishments Cummings Foundation has enabled since 2015: 

• We began working together with the City of Boston’s Start Strong program to empower youth of color to prevent dating violence and promote healthy relationships through survivor- and peer-led education, outreach, and hotline services. The second class of Teen Peer Leaders will begin teaching teen dating violence prevention workshops in middle schools, high schools, and after-school sites this fall.
• In order to address the stigma, isolation, and access inequities faced by domestic violence survivors, we developed new ways to engage at-risk communities of color at neighborhood sites in Dorchester and Roxbury.
• In partnership with the EVA Center, we established a comprehensive exit program for survivors of commercial sex trafficking. Our merger with the EVA Center allowed us to open the first and only residential shelter program in the nation for victims of commercial sex trafficking, which houses up to nine women and their children.
• We worked with community partners to expand housing opportunity for domestic violence survivors and their families, including by implementing a Rapid Rehousing program that helps survivors quickly move from homelessness to permanent, safe, affordable housing.

We are deeply grateful to Cummings Foundation, its staff and board, and its founders, the inspirational philanthropists Joyce and Bill Cummings, for making all of this possible. After joining The Giving Pledge in 2011, Joyce and Bill went from making quiet contributions in their community to establishing what has become one of the largest foundations in New England.

Cummings Foundation, based in Woburn, awards $10 million each year through its $100K for 100 grant program, with $100,000 earmarked for each of 100 Massachusetts nonprofits. Through this program and others, Cummings has already awarded more than $200 million in grants to Greater Boston nonprofits alone.

Earlier this year, Bill Cummings released a new autobiography, Starting Small and Making It Big: An Entrepreneur’s Journey to Billion-Dollar Philanthropist, in which her shares his hard-won insights from seven decades of both building businesses and giving back on a major scale. You can read excerpts from Bill’s book or order your own copy on his website.

To Bill and Joyce and everyone at Cummings Foundation, we thank you for your extraordinary commitment to the communities of Greater Boston and exemplary support for survivors of domestic violence at Casa Myrna.