Grants
The Hattie E. Evans Family Foundation builds practical, on-the-ground infrastructure that connects Birmingham families and residents to the services and opportunities they need, rather than delivering another disconnected program. The grants and partnerships below fund that work directly. Each one reflects a real need our community named to us first.
Grants Received
FY26 Alabama Summer and/or Afterschool Program (ASAP) Grant: Birmingham
Funder: Alabama State Department of Education
Partners: XSTREAM Minds Academy (anchor organization), Parenting Culture, and the Hattie E. Evans Family Foundation
This collaborative award supports a coordinated afterschool and summer learning program serving PreK through 8th grade students across several Birmingham City Schools sites, now extending through 12th grade with the addition of Beyond the Game (below). XSTREAM Minds Academy leads academic instruction in literacy, math, STEM, and the arts. Parenting Culture provides social-emotional learning support and developmental screening. The Foundation leads family engagement, attendance support, resource navigation, and program data and evaluation across the partnership, the same coordination role it plays in every initiative it touches.
How it fits our mission: This program is a direct example of the Foundation's core belief that a young person's progress in one setting should strengthen their progress in every other setting, whether that is a classroom, a home, or a playing field.
FY26 Alabama Summer and/or Afterschool Program (ASAP) Grant: Montgomery
Funder: Alabama State Department of Education
Partners: Together We Can Inc. (anchor organization), Parenting Culture, and the Hattie E. Evans Family Foundation
This collaborative award brings the same coordinated model to Montgomery, serving PreK through 12th grade students across several Montgomery Public Schools sites. Together We Can blends academic instruction aligned to Alabama's College and Career Ready Standards with sports-based enrichment, STEM, and trauma-informed mentoring. Parenting Culture again leads social-emotional learning and family wellness support, while the Foundation leads family engagement navigation and manages program data and evaluation through its Continuum Nexus platform.
How it fits our mission: The Birmingham and Montgomery awards share one model on purpose. The Foundation builds coordination infrastructure once and extends it to wherever a community names the same need, rather than reinventing the approach city by city.
Beyond the Game
Across both the Birmingham and Montgomery programs, local coaches and parents kept telling Foundation staff the same thing: their student-athletes needed support that extended past practices and games. Beyond the Game is the Foundation's response, extending both ASAP programs into grades 9 through 12 and connecting high school student-athletes and their families to the same family engagement, resource navigation, and academic support already built into the ASAP model, with particular attention to the extra weight a student-athlete carries: balancing training and competition with academics, planning for life after their playing days end, and getting mentorship from adults who understand that specific pressure.
Visit the Beyond the Game hubNPN Creation Fund: Rootwork Residency
Funder: National Performance Network (The Creation Fund)
Partners: The Flourish Alabama, Coleman Center for the Arts, and the Hattie E. Evans Family Foundation, through the Flourish Fellows Residency
The Foundation is proud to support Birmingham multidisciplinary writer and facilitator Keimaya Downey through Rootwork: A Black Southern Performance & Community Exchange Residency. Through this residency, Keimaya is developing words on the way home, an immersive literary, spoken word, and musical storytelling experience exploring Black womanhood, grief, healing, emotional inheritance, identity, and self-reclamation. The work takes shape over an eight-week residency process across Birmingham and York, Alabama, beginning in January 2027, and culminates in public presentations in Alabama and New York City in the spring.
How it fits our mission: Cultural identity and creative expression is one of the Foundation's four core focus areas alongside family support, community partnerships, and education pathways. Supporting a Birmingham-based Black Southern artist's development, on her own terms and with fair compensation for her labor, is this focus area in practice.