News

Dandelion wins $100k grant to expand catering

John William Pope Foundation President John Hood praises Safelight's Dandelion Eatery, which received a $100,000 grant to expand its commercial kitchen.

By Bill Moss, Published: February 29, 2016

Men in suits and the director of Safelight made comments during the announcement of a big grant that will help Safelight’s Dandelion Eatery expand its commercial kitchen.

But the real star of the show — the reason the show happened at all — was invisible to the crowd of supporters that cheered the grant. A former client of the women’s domestic abuse shelter wrote the application that won Safelight (formerly Mainstay) a $100,000 grant — the first of its kind by the John William Pope Foundation.
The grant writer, who did not want her name used because of concerns for her family, said in an interview outside the glare of a news conference that low self-esteem had caused her to drop out of school. Always a passionate writer, she took on the assignment to write a grant proposal that described how the kitchen expansion would train more wome and  make them marketable in the work force and financially independent.
“I received help and it’s come full circle with the awarding of the grant,” she said. She now works at a church office and is returning to college.
Her commitment to the mission came through in the application, said David Stover, a Pope Foundation board member.
“As a board I can say that the proposal for this project was outstanding,” he said. “You could feel the passion come through in that proposal. The end goal that you have here is to help people help themselves. And that was another thing that really stuck, to us. If we can help people help themselves and break that cycle and be productive citizens there’s nothing more beautiful than that.”
Pope Foundation president John Hood praised the Dandelion for its solution-based program that hires domestic violence victims as interns and by training them as cooks and servers helps them break the cycle of dependence and abuse.
The Dandelion project is “not just something that is benefiting one community but we hope a program that will inspire others to do similar things in their community,” Hood said. “That’s one of the things we were looking for when we created the Joy Pope Memorial grants. We need people to come to us and say this is how you should do it. That’s why we seek out organizations that know things we don’t know — solutions on the ground that work. This is one of them.”
The two grants it awarded came from nonprofits
“That was great because part of our purpose was to learn,” he said. “We have some ideas about how that might work but we know there’s a lot we don’t know, and one of the purposes of the Joy Pope Memorial Grant was to discover ideas, to support them, to nurture them and to make other people aware of them across the state.”
Safelight’s mission to “make hope real” is a fitting match for the Pope Foundation’s mission to find and spread the word about nongovernment human services solutions that work.
“That is a mission we are privileged to invest in,” Hood added. “This grant proposal resulted in nearly 100 proposals from around North Carolina. We chose Safelight and Dandelion Eatery to be the first recipient of the Joy Pope Memorial Grant.”
Tanya Blackford, Safelight’s executive director, recalled that when she and board members first began talking about the Dandelion, she had to admit to doubters that she knew nothing about running a restaurant.
“We were willing to invest this money for the possibility that we can change lives in the future,” she said. “We have watched this project change people’s lives — not only the interns’ but in the community. It is a privilege to watch that change happen.”