WiseTribe recently received a $50,000 grant from Impact 100 Men of Palm Beach County on June 2 at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach.
WiseTribe, a Delray Beach-based nonprofit, intends to use the funds to establish an outdoor STEM lab at South Tech Preparatory Academy in Boynton Beach. Accessible to over 500 students, the lab is aimed at improving educational outcomes while inspiring sixth- to eighth-graders to participate in the new food and health industry.
The lab will include a space for students to engage in nurturing environment with seating, whiteboards, shade and features for teachers to enhance lesson plans.
“Impact 100 Men is a relatively new foundation. They’ve been around for five years,” WiseTribe founder and Executive Director Jacqueline Botting said. “We applied last year and we did not become a finalist. This year, we applied with this project to build an outdoor learning lab for STEM at SouthTech and we won. We should be doing a ribbon-cutting as of late September.”
Impact 100 Men’s grant committee reviews all letters of inquiry and then requests full grant applications from a smaller group of charities. Three semifinalists are chosen from the collective group and those organizations make presentations to the full memberships at its annual meeting.
“What WiseTribe is aiming to provide our schools is a modern barnraiser,” Botting said. “Where it’s a collective group of citizens from the community that comes together to really help support our schools with gardening and food production. Thinking about food production, how it can be done sustainably by making use of the technologies.”
