Growing economic equity and supporting living languages

According to a recent survey, one in eight employees in Battle Creek, Michigan, is searching for child care and 62% miss at least one day of work each month because of problems with child care. WKKF grantee Pulse recently received a $150,000 Regional Child Care Planning Grant from the Early Childhood Investment Corporation, also a WKKF grantee. This funding will help Pulse develop a comprehensive plan to address the child care crisis in partnership with economic developers, local government officials, families, child care providers and community-based organizations.

The Mexican news site Crónica ran a piece on the Autonomous University of Yucatán’s plan to develop the first Mexico-based linguistic corpus of Yucatec Maya, the part of the Mayan family of languages that is spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula. The corpus will be a collection of multimedia files (audio and video), which will form a vast record of the spoken language. It will be used for the development of dictionaries, teaching materials and other academic applications. As Maya is a living language, the corpus will be kept open so words can be added indefinitely. WKKF supports this initiative as part of its focus on promoting the revitalization of the Maya language in the Yucatán Peninsula.

WKKF grantee LINC UP in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is working toward racial equity through the Community Owns Safety Coalition, that aims to empower citizens and help them advocate for policies and opportunities for people in under-resourced communities and neighborhoods of focus. LINC UP’s initiative reflects WKKF’s commitment to creating more equitable community and economic development, by connecting residents to career opportunities and organizing them around community benefit agreements, which are mutually beneficial agreements that detail the benefits a community will receive in return for supporting a developer’s project in their neighborhood.

In an hour-long interview with Haitian news outlet and grantee AyiboPost, grantee Gaël Pressoir, dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (FSAE) at Quisqueya University, discussed how Haiti can combat food insecurity through increased domestic production. He explained how policy, investment, research and a wide range of innovations can dramatically expand domestic production, protecting the country from the fragility of an over-reliance on imports. WKKF supports FSAE’s applied research to fight cash crop diseases and develop food products, among other aims.