Meet This Month's Finalists and Vote!

Karen Blessen started MasterPEACE: Young Artists Making a Kinder World after a 30-year career as a graphic artist and journalist. MasterPEACE was born from tragedy. In 2000, a senseless murder occurred in front of Karen’s home. Changed, she saw the colossal waste and loss caused by violent behavior and felt a passion to use the power of art to teach children about nonviolence. MasterPEACE is an art-based, hands-on curriculum that teaches essential social values like kindness and compassion, and important life skills such as problem solving, conflict resolution and analytical thinking. From 2007 to 2012, MasterPEACE served thousands of children – including refugees, pregnant and parenting teens, and at-risk youth.

Things went south for John Fugazzie after 9/11. His consulting business failed and his house went into foreclosure. Unable to find decent work, he sought out help at a job-seeking group at the local library. There, he met several other people in a similar situation and that gave him the idea for Neighbors-Helping-Neighbors USA, volunteer support and network group targeted to unemployed or underemployed individuals. After only 16 months of existence, they have helped 131 people find work—without a budget.

People with autism are often talented in technology yet unemployed due to their social communication skills. In 2010 Vicki Hill, mother of an autistic adult, met two dads with autistic sons who were starting to train adults with autism to create video games and apps. Together they opened nonPareil Institute on a college campus in Texas in 2010 with eight students. Today, nonPareil employs 11 autistic adults and trains nearly 80 more to create and sell video games and apps. The Marigold grant would go toward scholarships for student training at nonPareil.

Amanda Johnson lives in Detroit, where support for low-income single mothers is especially low since cuts to the federal Temporary Aid to Needy Families program. Johnson wants women with only a high school education to be able to work and have a secure future. That’s why she’s starting Precise Parenting, an organization to provide a computer and other in-house equipment to low-income women so they can become virtual call center representatives who work from home. In addition to jobs, Precise will provide parent education, employment preparation, including call center etiquette and training.

Bruce Pollock founded Friends of Educational Excellence (FREE) in 2010 to help teachers and students in the city of Rochester, New York. About half of all Rochester city children live in poverty, and the majority of its students could not pass the 2011 New York State English Language Arts exam. FREE provides volunteers to work with public school teachers to tutor students and support overburdened teachers. The Marigold grant would help support a larger network of volunteers at 10 Rochester schools.

Barbara Rodriguez plans to provide scholarships for speech-language therapy services for immigrant children in New Mexico. The goal is to focus on enhancing development for young children with impairments, so that they won’t enter school behind their peers. A native New Mexican, Rodriguez has seen first-hand the struggles of immigrant children whose parents are unable to pay for developmental services. She wants to implement her idea at the Speech Language and Hearing Clinic at the University of New Mexico, where she works as a speech language pathologist.

Deborah Tobola taught creative writing and art in the California prison system for 12 years. Seeing the power of the arts to change lives, she left her job to start the Poetic Justice Project in 2009, a theater company that educates audiences about incarceration while empowering former inmates to communicate through the arts. In California, the recidivism rate for people coming out of prison is 70 percent. For Poetic Justice Project participants, it’s only 2 percent.