Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service Mini-Grants
Kansas Campus Compact, with the support of the North Carolina Campus Compact, was proud to promote the 2011 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service program by offering $2,500 in five sub-grants to campuses creating or expanding MLK Jr. Day of Service curricular or co-curricular service-learning activities that contribute to physically, emotionally, and economically healthier families, especially among low-income Kansans.
When Dr. King spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he didn’t just reference his dream of a better future for his children for rhetoric effect. He knew that healthy families – economically healthy, physically healthy, and emotionally healthy – are touchstones of the American Dream. In Kansas communities, economic distress and continued disparities in education, quality health care, and employment prospects have yielded new levels of misery for families. Fifteen percent of children in Kansas live in households below the poverty line, and 38 percent live below 200% of the poverty level. More than 40 percent of children are eligible for free or reduced price school lunch, including several counties where that number exceeds 70 percent. Nearly 12 percent of Kansans are medically uninsured, including nearly ten percent of children.
While these challenges are systemic and cannot be solved with a single action, students at Kansas colleges and universities can help their neighbors and communities take positive strides toward solving them.
Grant Application Details can be found here.
For specific questions, please email joshuamo@k-state.edu or call (785) 532-6896.
