Community Grants
Supporting Our Local Community
Each year the Civic Council awards grants to community groups working to meet the needs of and improve the quality of life for community members in and around Park Slope. Generally, the Civic Council funds grants with funding raised through our annual House Tour. While we were unfortunately unable to have the House Tour due to the pandemic, our trustees were happy to approve a limited number of grants to support the great work of groups in and around the Park Slope community. We encourage community members to support the great work of our local community organizations!
2025 Grants Winners
Brooklyn Arts Exchange
The grant will be used for interdisciplinary exploration in their 2026 School Breaks Arts Program. Children aged 6-12 will explore seasonal transformation and cycles; their roles as environmental stewards and community caretakers; imaginative and speculative futures; neighborhood history as well as local organic and urban designs.
Brooklyn ReWilders 
The grant will provide operating support to sustain and expand environmental sustainability education for Park Slope elementary students at PS282 and PS133 and support year-round maintenance of the school gardens.
Cyberarts Studio Academy
The grant funds the launch of the Student Media Leadership Club, empowering multilingual learners, students with disabilities, and all students to become creative leaders and storytellers. Students will research local environmental challenges and opportunities, selecting project themes such as recycling, reducing waste, energy efficiency, or urban green spaces. With support from teachers and local environmental mentors, participants will create digital media projects that highlight sustainability initiatives within the school and the Park Slope community.
Gowanus Mutual Aid NYCHA CSA 
The grant will help provide healthy food access to neighbors in need, focusing on residents of NYCHA houses in the Warren St., Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses and surrounding neighborhood. Many in this community are seniors and/or mobility-challenged people. The all volunteer-run group has few expenses other than the food they distribute. The season runs from May-November but their goal is to serve year-round
GreenSpace on 4th
The project will bring middle school students from Park Slope to the GreenSpace on 4th Ave, engaging them in hands-on compost education. Students will learn about and practice making compost from food waste collected at CHIPS food pantry and the Park Slope Food Coop. The garden is now processing about 800 pounds of food waste each week and using the finished compost on street trees and school gardens. The compost site is also host to many demonstrations and workshops for people of all ages.
Heights and Hills
The grant will fund instruction for a weekly Latin dance class. This support will allow Heights and Hills to continue offering the free class ensuring that older adults have access to a culturally rich, health-promoting program. The classes reduce isolation, bringing people together for a shared, uplifting activity.
Imani House Inc.
Imani House will hire a coordinator to help create and lead a climate-focused club and activities for 3rd – 5th grade after- school students to learn about climate change, environmental activism, and ways they can foster change and support their community. The students will learn about activism and can participate in action days with Imani House and their parents.
John Jay School for Law 
Lenovo laptops will provide students with the essential tools they need for the college application process. Due to the statewide ban on all personal devices and the school’s lack of computers for the college application support class, many will fall behind on applications or not even apply.
Old Stone House & Washington Park
The grant will provide general operating support to enable OSH to continue to provide free or low cost space indoors and outdoors for a large number of community based programs, meetings and events, including for Park Slope Civic Council. Even though they are closing for renovations in 2027, they plan to continue to work on site to support outdoor community programs. OSH will undergo a complete accessibility renovation, making the building fully accessible to audiences for the first time in 93 years.
PS 107
The grant will help PS 107 expand its homestead and add three hens to its flock, as well as expand garden beds to the 8th Avenue side of the building. Homestead Chicken Garden empowers young learners to grow, share, and care. Rooted in food justice and community values, they create a welcoming space where all Park Slopers are welcome to explore where food comes from, how it’s grown, and why everyone deserves access to fresh, healthy food.
PS 133 PTA
The grant will underwrite materials to revitalize the PS 133 Garden of Wonder, replacing the existing wooden garden beds with long-lasting galvanized steel. The Garden is a sustainable edible garden and a haven for native plants. At the garden classroom, students learn about the importance of native plants with the study of bees, butterflies, and other garden critters. They plant, maintain, study, harvest, and savor edible plants through curriculum-tied activities.
Saint Augustine Saint Francis Food Pantry
The grant will fund shelf stable items for 100 families per month in need. The food pantry has been ongoing at St. Francis Xavier since 1882. They have responded to the needs of the community through two world wars, the Spanish flu epidemic and the Great Depression.
White Bird Productions
The grant will support a participatory puppet performance at the Prospect Park Picnic House in June, 2026. The project began through a collaboration with the Prospect Park Alliance Archives, where White Bird’s creative team discovered a poster from the 1960s advertising Eeyore’s Birthday Party. No other records remain – this joyful piece of Brooklyn’s cultural history has nearly vanished. This new event revives that lost tradition while engaging Park Slope families in environmental stewardship through art. White Bird uses recycled and upcycled materials and the activities will incorporate lessons about local ecology, native plants, and invasive species.
Previous Awardees Include:
2022:
A student-led effort at Middle School 88 to create a native plant and pollinator garden on the perimeter of Slope Park Playground at 6th Avenue and 18th Street. This project will convert the neighborhood green space into a field study site for 1,200 students, engage students from neighboring schools, residents and passersby in park stewardship, nature appreciation and hands-on environmental activism, and invite community involvement and ongoing stewardship through successive plantings, clean-ups and celebrations.
Arts Gowanus’s ongoing Gallery Dispersed program, an ongoing neighborhood “gallery” using the walls of local businesses and venues, parks, vacant storefronts, and studio spaces, unified through cohesive identity, themed exhibits, art and civic dialogues, and coordinated openings. Gallery Dispersed offers a platform for creative expression and economic development for diverse populations in Brooklyn.
Camp Friendship to offset some routine costs that are necessary for their do day-to-day work. This will likely include the purchase of bins to protect their food, wagons to help them move thousands of pounds of produce from the sidewalk into our building, and folding tables to help them continue to serve food in a client choice model.
Brooklyn Book Bodega to support their work increasing the number of 100+ book homes for kids 0-18 in New York City. Brooklyn Book Bodega provides access to and ownership of books, builds community, and creates a passion for learning through free events and literacy-based community programming. They hold events all over Brooklyn, give out books to anyone who needs them. The organization has book drop sites in Brooklyn, including at the Old Stone House.
2021: Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Brooklyn Seeds, Gowanus Dredgers
2020: Brooklyn Public Library, CHIPS, Dancewave, Imani House, Once Breath Rising, Opera on Tap, Spellbound Theatre, Spoke the Hub
2019: Brooklyn Youth Music Project, Dancewave, Old Stone House, One Breath Rising, Opera on Tap, Piper Theater, PS 282’s Green Zone Project, Spellbound Theatre, Spoke the Hub
2018: Camp Friendship, GreenSpace on Fourth Community Garden, Heights & Hills, One Breath Rising, Friends of Pacific Library, Piper Theatre, PS 39 Green Committee, T.E.A.L.
For more information please contact the grants committee at grants@parkslopeciviccouncil.org