Donor’s Legacy Continues to Empower Women in Charlotte

Gulf Coast Community Foundation’s Board of Directors recently approved three grants totaling $67,000 from the Miriam P. Raines Charitable Fund, an endowment created to help women in Charlotte County help themselves by furthering their life skills. The new grants brought the total awarded from this charitable fund to nearly half a million dollars in a little over four years. 

The Gulf Coast Board approved $22,000 to Gulf Coast Partnership to help provide safe housing to women suffering from homelessness; $25,000 to United Way of Charlotte County to support low-income female-headed households with access to a variety of services; and $20,000 to Virginia B. Andes Volunteer Community Clinic to increase access to healthcare for uninsured senior women in Charlotte County. 

Women helping women

Through a bequest in her will, Miriam Raines established the Miriam P. Raines Charitable Fund at Gulf Coast as a field-of-interest fund focused on assisting women in Charlotte County through access to education and improvement of their life skills. Mrs. Raines wanted to uplift women and help them keep their families together by giving them to tools to remain independent.

Since June 2015, when the first grant was awarded from Mrs. Raines’s fund, over $450,000 has gone back into the community she called home. True to her wishes, Gulf Coast staff works closely with nonprofit and government leaders in Charlotte County to ensure that meaningful grants are awarded in support of the purpose she identified for her fund.

“To hear the major partners that have received investments from the Miriam P. Raines Charitable Fund describe the local lives they’ve helped change is just awe-inspiring,” says Angie Matthiessen, executive director of United Way of Charlotte County. “Surely Mrs. Raines is looking down and smiling, knowing that her wishes and dreams for women in Charlotte County are being realized.”

United Way’s new grant will support a dedicated consultant who can connect women to a variety of “wraparound services” offered by different United Way-funded agencies. For example, if a woman comes to a nonprofit for a particular program or service, she can be directly referred to additional supports such as income-tax assistance, financial empowerment, GED and career pathway services, parent groups and caregiver support, and mental-health first aid. The approach supports the collective-impact strategy that UWCC has adopted to make community dollars go farther in improving the lives of all county residents.

Impactful Giving

Previous grants issued from the Raines Fund have been used to assist survivors of domestic violence, help single mothers struggling to make ends meet, support women overcoming addiction, and much more. In all, more than 20 grants have been awarded from the fund.

“The Miriam P. Raines Charitable Fund is an amazing example of the impact a single donor’s generosity can have on a community,” says Gulf Coast President | CEO Mark Pritchett. “We’re thankful she trusted Gulf Coast with her legacy and wish she could see the lives she has transformed through her giving.”

The Miriam P. Raines Charitable Fund is one of nearly 1,000 charitable funds administered by Gulf Coast.