Greater East St. Louis Community Fund

The Fund works to support programs and provide scholarships to graduating high school seniors who are residents of East St. Louis and Brooklyn, Illinois. Our grants and scholarships are used to create greater outcomes for children and youth of East St. Louis and Brooklyn, Illinois.

Scholarships -
Imagine - you have no financial support from your family to help finance your college education. More families than not are faced with that reality in East St. Louis and Brooklyn.
The Fund makes available college scholarships to low-income East St. Louis and Brooklyn High School graduating Seniors moving on to college. Most of our applicants have zero dollars available for college as reported by the Federal Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and 75% have less than $2,000 dollars available for college.

What's unique about our scholarship is that it is for four years and the amount increases as grades and progression through college increases. Our college graduation retention rate is approximately 50% and our graduates attend major colleges and universities across the country such as: Howard University, Spelman College, Fisk University; University of Illinois: Urbana Champaign, Washington University, Duke University, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and Carbondale campuses as well as the University of Missouri. The average grade point average of our incoming scholarship recipient is over a 3.0.

Grants
The Fund has provided grants to nonprofit youth serving organizations who deliver programs and services for school-aged children during out-of-school time. The Fund created the Greater East St. Louis Youth Coordinating Council, which is a collection of organizations that work together to impact the lives of children and youth. When the Fund staffed the Council, it created a city-wide summer worker training program and a city-wide field-day, that offered a day of fun and games for children enrolled in 6 youth servicing agencies in East St. Louis. While under the Fund's leadership, the Youth Coordinating Council created nearly 1300 new summer program slots for school-aged children.