Santa Maria Awarded $25,000 for Dater4Kids Program

Santa Maria Community Services is pleased to announce it has been awarded $25,000 from the Charles H. Dater Foundation for its Dater4Kids Program. Dater4Kids supports violence prevention and educational activities designed to foster young people’s social skills, tolerance, responsibility to community, and success in school. Activities include leadership development groups, educational field trips, sports team sponsorship, summer camp, and parental involvement. The grant will help to support all of Santa Maria’s youth development services, which assist approximately 520 disadvantaged youth in Lower and East Price Hill ages 2-19 (and their families).

Currently, the Lower and East Price Hill neighborhoods struggle with high poverty and unemployment rates, crime, school drop-out rates, and increasing drug activity, particularly with heroin and other opiates. Santa Maria’s youth development services engage Price Hill youth in community activities to keep them off the streets, enhance their academic success, develop social and emotional skills, promote community responsibility, teach tolerance for diversity, foster leadership skills, promote responsible, action-oriented behavior among youth and their parents, and provide violence prevention tactics, all of which help enhance self-esteem.

The Charles H. Dater Foundation was founded in 1985 and makes grants to non-profit organizations in the Greater Cincinnati area to carry out projects that benefit young people and focus in the areas of arts/culture, education, healthcare, social services and other community needs.  The Foundation does not operate programs, but makes grants to private, non-profit organizations and public agencies for their programs and projects.