How can Lowndes County have a brighter future?
For the Lowndes Community Foundation, an affiliate of the Tupelo-based CREATE Foundation, there isn’t one answer. But five task forces are working toward that goal, focused on community engagement, crime and addiction, education, poverty, and vision and leadership.
At a Communities of Excellence event at the Trotter Convention Center Monday night, the foundation’s task forces presented current progress updates and future project plans to a crowd of about 120. The foundation also received $10,000 from CREATE and TVA to kick start some of these future projects.
“When we started the Communities of Excellence initiative, CREATE and TVA partnered together to come up with a sum of money where all of the counties that we serve … can receive a $10,000 check to really just get the process started,” P.K. Thomas, director of development for the CREATE Foundation, told The Dispatch Monday night.
The Communities of Excellence initiative kicked off in 2023, an initiative which connected many of the CREATE Foundation’s affiliates with the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Mississippi State University and the University of Mississippi, providing additional support to their community initiatives.
While the CREATE Foundation has connected LCF to these other organizations, LCF co-chair Tyler Covington said the community foundation has also made its own connections between donors and charitable organizations, helping to facilitate grants and build its endowment since its founding.
“Over the lifetime of the foundation in Lowndes County, we’ve given over $220,000 in grants to 47 organizations and projects in 10 years,” LCF co-chair Tyler Covington said. “Our endowment fund, as of April 30, had a balance of $416,983. Those dollars, combined with what we’ve given in the community, is almost $637,000 that have been or will be invested into Lowndes County.”
Future projects
Cole Bryan with the Dream Center Golden Triangle and the community engagement task force presented two programs focused on food insecurity, including an expansion of the Dream Center’s Dream Wagon program, which delivers hot dogs and burgers to youth in need.
“The meal is a means to a deeper relationship,” Bryan said. “The real value that the kids get are in the interactions they have with individuals that care about them, that will love on them, that are interested in what their futures look like.”
Currently, Bryan said, the program has picked one neighborhood and stuck with it. But Bryan said the Dream Center hopes to purchase 15 passenger vans to pick up children across the city and bring them to a central location for a meal to reach even more hungry children in need.
Bryan said the Dream Center has also been converting a warehouse into a massive food pantry, but it needs a half-ton pickup and a box truck to get food directly from suppliers to become less dependent on the Mississippi Food Network, the only food bank in Mississippi.
“We are going to eliminate hunger in this region,” Bryan said.
Melinda Lowe, with the education task force, said her group’s goal is to use Excel by 5 to continue to support early childhood education and to expand up to the age of 21 years old with the EmpowerED program.
This program will focus on educating parents along with their children, including subjects like holistic health and wellness, financial literacy, nutrition and more. Lowe said the EmpowerED program will also help with school readiness.
“For example, do parents really know how to support their third-graders as they work towards and prepare to take the third-grade reading gate test?” Lowe asked.
Sandra DePriest, with the poverty task force and the Golden Triangle Regional Homeless Coalition, presented an addition to the nonprofit’s Fresh Start Tiny Home Village.
She said the coalition has purchased the administrative building for the tiny village and received its first tiny home. But GTRHC wants to build a $700,000, 100-by-35-foot building at the front of the village to act as a warming shelter, cooling shelter and storage area with lockers and bins for the homeless.
“Homeless men, women and children are sometimes even recognized as homeless because they’re carrying their entire lives around with them and they lose what they cannot carry,” DePriest said. “What are they to do when they have a job interview? What are they to do when they go to look for a place to live?”
Other projects included student mentorship and leadership development programs, career programs, clothing projects and more.
Members of the five task forces also presented projects they have already completed since their 2018 inception, including supporting the Dream Center’s Bedz 4 Kidz program, which has placed 900 beds in impoverished homes around Lowndes County, helping to fund the Columbus Air Force Base’s Hangout Teen Center, helping put 40 bans on the sale of kratom in place for different government entities across the state of Mississippi, providing 4,000 training hours to early childhood educators with the CHEER conference and more.
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You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 32 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
