Our Grantees | The Spruce Foundation

Since 2014, the Spruce Foundation has awarded over $340,000 in grant funding to local nonprofits that support, empower, educate, and care for youth in our city. In 2023, we eliminated our grant categories — formerly Education, Arts, Health and Wellness, and LGBTQ — to dismantle the barrier applicants faced of having to box in how their efforts impact youth. Check out some of our incredible grantees below!

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2025

Art Sphere, Inc. (ASI) engages the creative in youth, empowers neighborhoods to explore the positives in people’s lives, and heals the mind, body, and spirit through the arts. By embracing the strengths of the youth and their community, ASI seeks to build safe and rich learning environments with an emphasis on the creative use of local resources. Their site-specific art workshops make any space a living classroom where students gain confidence in their worth.

BOLT (Building Our Lives Together) works to cultivate, support, and empower grassroots leaders to drive community-led change. Our vision is for every neighborhood to thrive, led by the people living there. We focus on elevating residents of low-income neighborhoods to lead the change. We strongly believe this work has to be intergenerational, which is why we work with both community leaders to build their capacity and public school youth to build a pipeline of leaders with lived experience.

Discovery Pathways works to uplift the well-being of the community and environment through experiential, nature-based programs. By providing hands-on environmental education to urban youth and adults, they empower leaders and cultivate a connection to the natural world and local watershed. Discovery Pathways works tirelessly to ensure under-served communities can pursue meaningful outdoor experiences.

EleganceXtreme, Inc. works to impact how children, families, and communities navigate and heal from trauma. They believe in the transformative power of support, education, and healing when facing life’s most challenging circumstances, including loss, drug abuse, and physical or emotional harm. Their goal is to equip those affected with the tools and resources they need to not only survive but to thrive. EleganceXtreme, Inc. is dedicated to fostering a safe, nurturing environment where individuals can find comfort, rebuild their strength, and reclaim their lives.

2023

Achieve Now works to produce strong, confident, effective, and joyful readers who see reading as an integral part of their lives and are life-long learners. Their mission is to bring all K-2 students to grade-level reading while integrating the best practices that achieve this result into daily school curricula. To empower students, they use values-driven and asset-based language, encouraging them to self-regulate, to share what they are feeling and articulate what they need, and to take ownership of their learning.

Collective Climb (CC) empowers BIPOC teenagers (aged 15-19) in West Philadelphia as the “leaders of liberation” through CC’s Restorative Community Project (RCP), a program where young people work as co-authors of a research report focused on participatory action, restorative justice, and building the restorative community. Their mission also includes their Collective Kickbacks, free community dialogues facilitated by RCP circle-keepers, and their Youth Advisory Board.

We Love Philly empowers students with positive community experiences and essential professional skills through mindfulness, volunteerism, entrepreneurship, ownership, and content creation. Among their many initiatives, their student-driven curriculum and innovative cooperative ownership structures – in which students actually own, manage, sell, and profit from specific projects – motivate participants to graduate high school, earn money, and learn sustainable in-demand professional trades.

Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers (KYL/D) celebrates the ability of dance to integrate body, spirit, and mind, proceeding from a rich frame informed by diverse philosophies, living traditions, and contemplative practices of Asian origin. One of KYL/D’s main programs is CHI Dance where students learn fundamental dance technique through the skills mindfulness provides, allowing them to focus on the connection of body, mind, and breath inside and outside of the classroom.

2022

Hand2Paw currently offers two paid internships and a summer program per year. With Unleashing Opportunities, participants learn the skills to work with homeless animals using positive training techniques that facilitate animal assisted interventions. The Pawspurr program fosters connection and community for young people through a weekly humane education curriculum that teaches conflict resolution, communication, job and personal goals, and explores careers in animal welfare. The Summer WorkReady program helps youth in the child welfare system develop job and personal skills for future employment.

They use community-based music programs to expose their students to the expansive musical community that is there to support them wherever they are. With programs throughout the city, BTB works to make musical spaces as accessible for young people as possible. When young people identify music as their medium for expression and growth, BTB works to support them in joining additional Beyond the Bars programs and connecting them to a network of over 30 community-based organizations throughout Philadelphia that will support them throughout their adolescence.

YAP recognizes the daily barriers young people face when living in poverty in Philadelphia, and takes a harm reduction approach to making YAP a safe haven. Their studio provides free access to high speed internet, fresh food, feminine hygiene products, prophylactics, as well as art supplies. YAP is youth-led. Participants identify different artistic skills and social justice topics they want to learn more about and work with Lead Teaching Artists (LTA) to design a project based curriculum for the year.

Spells Writing Lab received this grant as a special fifth award in honor of the Spruce Foundation's 15th anniversary. Though they runs many programs, this year's focused on the Dream Studio, a STEAM-based interdisciplinary exploration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech in which students brainstorm social issues and envision positive outcomes for the future and the Yoga and Personal Narrative Writing program, a pilot program using the relaxation of beginner yoga as a gateway to writing more authentic personal narratives for college entrance essays.

2020

Happening in school settings, their Science of Experimental Writing is the core program that takes students on an imaginative journey through the creative writing process, from developing a strong setting and three-dimensional characters to building suspense and revising. Incorporating group games, creative thinking, immersive props, and interaction with dedicated volunteers, lessons are designed to reinforce core writing concepts using non-traditional techniques that engage even the most resistant, struggling student writers.

Their paid internship program teaches personal and professional youth development through finance, real estate, and entrepreneurship. The specific program objectives are for high school students to master positive self-identity, resourcefulness; public speaking; as well as an in- depth understanding of entrepreneurship; money management; college/career planning; and business and real estate basics.

Though the Foundation runs three main programs, their main focus is the Basketball Camp program, which offers a unique mix of athletic and educational programming during the last week of August, when most free summer programs have ended but most public schools have not yet started. Programs include midday workshops on yoga, coding, arts and crafts. Their hope and goal is to grow each of these programs and add complementary programs that build on this foundation.

Through performance and conversation, their Outreach Program’s goal is to inspire LGBTQ youth to be empowered, proud, and resilient. Simultaneously, by reaching students of all identities, the Chorus also creates the opportunity for non-LGBTQ students to confront and reduce prejudice, creating a safer and more accepting school environment. This program is a way for students to see that there is love, acceptance, community, and success outside of high school.