For more than 25 years, the Youth Philanthropy Board (YPB), however, has been putting Delaware high school students in charge of studying issues their communities face, soliciting and vetting grant applications, visiting applicant sites, and ultimately deciding how to allocate thousands of dollars in funds for programs designed to benefit the public good.
A program of the Delaware Community Foundation (DCF), the YPB assembles members of its individual county boards from local public, private, religious, and parochial schools throughout the First State. Teachers, counselors, and administrators can refer students, and those students must apply for membership. Over the program’s quarter century of existence, more than 700 students have served on their boards from Kent, Sussex, and New Castle counties and distributed more than $800,000 to 165 organizations over the life of the program.
At the YPB annual awards ceremony this past April, DCF announced that it allocated $71,492 for the boards from each county to distribute, with the New Castle County YPB receiving $22,992, $25,500 going to the Sussex County YBP, and $23,000 to the Kent County YPB. Gifts from the Atlantis Fund, the Burton family, DuPont, the Mildred H. and Ray A. Thompson Fund, and U.S. Rep. Lisa Blunt-Rochester (D-Del.) make the grant funds possible.
Blunt-Rochester says she believes in the impact the YPB program is making, so much so that she personally contributes to the YPB program through the GLOW Fund, which she established at the DCF.
“I have supported the DCF’s Youth Philanthropy Boards for several years and I am consistently impressed by the dedication of these young people,” she says. “They take remarkable care to evaluate the needs of nonprofits and allocate funds. It’s a tremendous opportunity to learn about the process of giving back, which can only strengthen their communities.”
Motivated to Give Back
Chloe Spinoza, a graduate of Dover High School and a 2024 Kent County YPB member, said she credits her participation in the group with inspiring her to pursue anthropology as a major at the University of Delaware (UD).
“It really encouraged my passion about learning about the human condition, because pretty much all of these nonprofits we’ve worked with, they’re addressing problems that everybody has had since the beginning of time,” she says.
She cites the Do Care Doula Foundation, which received a $5,000 grant from the YPB, among her favorite groups to work with. “They help a lot with motherhood, pregnancy, organizing home births. They encourage a community among new mothers, and I think that’s really important.”
As someone whose family has benefited from public assistance, Spinoza says she was also particularly passionate about funding the Capital Community Center, a program through the Capital School District that provides services and resources, including fresh food, sanitary products, and a computer lab for job certifications, to families experiencing homelessness.
“It’s just kind of amazing to see how many people in our community both need services and how many people are willing to provide them,” Spinoza says. “Everyone looks at the news and they see all these stories from other places, and it’s easy to think, ‘Oh, that’s not happening here. I live in Dover.’ But it’s really eye-opening to see these nonprofits and see specifically what services they’re providing and how much we need those services in our community.”
A Reflection of Values
For Justin Lunn, a graduate of Lake Forest High School in Felton, being a member of the Sussex County YPB was an opportunity to give back to others in a way he’d not experienced before.
“[I]t’s really eye-opening to see these nonprofits…and what services they’re providing and how much we need those services in our community.”
—Chloe Spinoza, Dover High School graduate
“The opportunity was presented to me, so it just seemed very interesting, something that I would like to do a lot since I was very involved in church at that time,” he says. “So, it kind of just meshed well with what I was doing at the time and still does now. So yeah, I thought it would be great for me and to help out the community.”
The experience gave him an in-depth look at not only large-scale altruism but also the mechanics of working with a committee to provide grants to those who need them, Lunn says.
“We wanted to make sure that the money was going to the right places. And I think it taught us a lot about good decision-making skills and definitely helped us develop upon our communication skills because I believe both years there was a decent amount of tension,” he says.
That tension, he says, arose from decisions to issue grants to some groups over others. “Some people are probably going to want the money to go toward one organization more than the other because they may have had something in their personal life that it hits their heart more,” Lunn says.
Among the groups the Sussex YPB did support were YWCA Delaware, with $4,000 to help address the needs of homeless women who are survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, and the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays, with $4,000 to support the Student Estuary Exploration program.
But Lunn, now a freshman at UD majoring in kinesiology, says he’s proud of the grants his group made, and he appreciated the chance to learn more about himself and the community at large.
“These issues that we talked about on the philanthropy board, they may have been brought up sometimes [in class], but my school didn’t have many clubs, and I feel like we didn’t really talk about issues going in the world that much,” Lunn says. “And I think some people at my school may have been living sheltered lives…so it definitely helped me be more aware of issues people are facing.”
Building Community Beyond Competition
Lauren Bolarinwa, a senior at Wilmington’s Tower Hill School, originally learned about the New Castle County YPB from her older sister, who recommended Lauren for the group before she graduated. Lauren joined the organization as a sophomore.
“The reason why she said I should join was that you get to help a lot of nonprofits and people who are really dedicated to solving the issues in Delaware,” she says. “Honestly, it was the fact that they let a group of high schoolers choose what nonprofits get grants and which ones we think are doing the most work for us. I thought that was what really drew me in because most of the time you see adults making these decisions and not really us.”
Out of the entire granting process, the site visits to assess and learn more about the applicants were her favorite part of participating in YPB, Bolarinwa says. With this year’s grant applicants, for instance, there was one group the board had ruled out—until she visited them in person.
“After the site visit, I [thought], I really like this group. We definitely have to give them grant money,” she says. “And then we actually ended up giving them a little extra and they were really thankful for it.”
Although she hadn’t previously been involved in much charity or philanthropy work before joining YPB, Bolarinwa says her participation has inspired her to do more for others as a student at Tower Hill. So far, she’s created a community CPR class and found another nonprofit group to cover the expense. “I still hope to fulfill philanthropy in other capacities, especially when I go off to college,” she says. “I think the Youth Philanthropy Board has really helped me with that.”
Aside from knowing she’s helping others, Bolarinwa says an added benefit to YPB membership was getting to know her peers from other schools outside of sports and its rivalries. “It was nice to build a community like that, too.”
Value in Being Chosen
Ashley Rice, founder of A Sister’s Village, knows the value of community. After becoming pregnant during her freshman year of college, she came to rely on two friends who were pregnant at the same time.
“We came together and figured it out and we really just raised our kids together their first five years of school. So that’s our first five years of life,” she says.
The goal is to be able to connect three women that have children or are pregnant around the same time so that they can then help each other with tasks that sound simple but can be overwhelming for new moms: child care, cooking, and friendship, Rice says.
“A Sister’s Village is all about helping young pregnant women and young mothers to form that community to be able to work together and just make it—to form that micro-village and grow and succeed in life,” she says. “We all did really great things and we look back like, how did we do it? And the answer was we had each other. So that’s where this nonprofit A Sister’s Village came from.”
But running a nonprofit doesn’t come without costs, which means Rice was immediately on the hunt for funding to support her vision. A big part of that foundation is ensuring that new moms or moms-to-be have safe and stable housing, and “this is an expensive endeavor, trying to get housing and housing grants for these women.”
On the hunt for grants, she found the Youth Philanthropy Board through a state of Delaware grant interface and this year received two YPB grants—one each for Kent and New Castle counties. The fact that high school students decide how to allocate the money in many ways makes the grants even more significant, she says.
“I think [making the grants] really gives them a sense of ownership. And if you start that off young, I think it can only grow from there,” Rice says. “They don’t get anything from making these decisions. But they choose to do it. They choose to be a part of that program. And I think it’s ridiculously helpful because they’re doing something beyond themselves and especially in that age range, it’s not a common thing.”
