Funded Partner Spotlight: She Wins Totally
Lifelong St. Petersburg resident Kenyatta Rucker launched her nonprofit four years ago, after helping people informally for years before that. She Wins Totally received a $10,000 capacity-building grant from the Foundation and Orlando Health Bayfront Hospital.
Tell us a little about your nonprofit: It’s named She Wins Totally because she never gives up. We started out working for women’s empowerment, assisting women with growth and inspiring sustainability. The thing that drives me is my experience working in the community. I owned a bail bonds agency serving the community for 20 years and saw needs that had to be met. When there’s work that needs to be done, you just get out and do it. We go out and try to uplift and see how we can assist women affected by the judicial system and those women with children facing homelessness or needing a leg up.
How do you work with the community? It depends on what the need is. Right now, we give out groceries, assisting over 100 people every week by partnering with a local church in Pinellas County. But everyone is different. You have to gauge what the individual need is and go from there – what is it you’re facing, what are you in need of? People come to me not knowing about resources, and I try to connect them with supports and opportunities that are available to them. I used to fund things directly from my pocket when people needed help. The grant from the Foundation and Orlando Health Bayfront Hospital have really helped me build out my program and make it sustainable. It’s allowed me to take what I do helping people navigate the system and come up with a process and plan.
How did you use your capacity-building grant funds? The grant allowed me to hire a grant writer and strategic planner who assisted me with creating a five-year plan for the organization. It gave us a roadmap to follow so that we’re not all over the place. We have everything written down now – this is how we market, this is how we serve people, these are our one-year goals, our two-year goals, and so on. Now instead of just saying yes all the time when people come to me, I say, okay, here’s the plan, and I stick to it. It’s given me a lot of clarity and helped me focus on what our organization’s role is. Sometimes when you know people have needs, you just want to help. But you can burn yourself out by going in too many directions. Now we have a plan that we can stick to. We may find we need to go back and update parts of it, but it helps keep us on track.
Tell us about some of your goals: We’ve applied for a few grants to be able to offer rental assistance to women and children. Our end goal is to build transitional housing for women with children who have been affected by homelessness or the judicial system so that they don’t have to go to a shelter. Our goal is to offer them housing while they go through a program that helps them gain stability. We’ve partnered with mental health counselors, GTE Financial, workforce agencies, etc. We’re the middle person or navigator, helping connect peole with the agencies that offer resources.
What keeps you going? Being able to help people. I just encountered a young lady with two kids who had lost her employment doing home health work because her client moved into a facility. She needed rental assistance for a month while she found a new job. She qualified for a program, had documentation, and was going through the system, but ended up getting an eviction because of something that happened with her caseworker. I was able to help get her eviction dropped by writing letters on her behalf to the apartment complex director and clerk of the court. I met with the rental assistance program director to advocate on her behalf, as well. Because of our interventions and advocacy, everything ended up working out. In the end, we were able to help her get the rental assistance she needed for a month. She found a new job, and just got her lease renewed. So she’s still in her home instead of being homeless with two kids.
How can people connect with your work or contribute to it? What would be helpful is donations or grants so that we can provide resources for women with children that need assistance. We need grants and donations for building or acquiring housing, which is part of our five-year plan.
For more information on She Wins Totally, visit their website at shewinstotally.org or their Facebook group.