Great news for community service-based organizations looking for assistance during this pandemic. 

The Prince William Area Disaster Fund’s application period opened. The fund was created as the combined disaster relief and recovery effort for the Greater Prince William area (The City of Manassas, The City of Manassas Park and Prince William County). 

The fund is administered by The Human Services Alliance of Greater Prince William and allows businesses, private citizens, faith-based groups and others to provide operational and programmatic support to organizations responding to the effects that COVID-19 has had on the community’s most vulnerable residents.

Grants of up to $5,000 are awarded to community-serving groups that serve residents of the Greater Prince William area.  Recipients are chosen based on projects they propose that support the fund’s strategic objectives. These objectives include meeting critical unmet needs; deploying effective groups and agencies with proven on-the-ground experience that are addressing emergency management and public health; enhancing service capacity for nonprofit and faith-based partners that have experienced a surge of assistance requests; addressing the unique needs of people from underserved communities; mitigating the impact of reduced wages and lost work; expanding access to childcare; and assisting with soft services.  

To date, $15,000 from the fund has been used to buy food to support the 43 area food distribution sites partnered with the Community Feeding Task Force.

Alliance Executive Director Chelsi Conaway said, “The needs of the human services community are immense. Throughout the grant selection process, we’ll seek to find a balance between the number of groups we can help and investments that will meaningfully support the work that they do. Given the tremendous needs our service providers face, we will continue to work tirelessly with partners to increase access to local resources in the weeks and months ahead.”

A committee of local community service providers will review proposals. 

For more information on the grant and to request funding, please visit www.alliancegpw.org/disasterfund.