Founded in 1995, TNSF is funded by contributions from faculty and staff of the university and awards grants annually to nonprofit organizations that are located in or serve Tufts' host communities of Medford, Somerville, Grafton, and Chinatown and that have volunteers from the Tufts community.
The organizations were selected from 49 proposals requesting a total of over $75,000.
The TNSF committee, which consists of Tufts administrators, faculty and staff, meets annually to allocate money raised by the fund. The grant recipients are chosen based on written proposals, the needs of the community and the amount of money available, according to Stacey Herman, associate dean for student affairs at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and a member of the TNSF board.
Tufts' Director of Community Relations Barbara Rubel expressed optimism about TNSF's continued fundraising success this year.
"Given that these are difficult times, we think that this is a very good response to this request," she said.
Rubel emphasized that TNSF is unable to fund many requests because there is a limited amount of money in the fund, a sentiment echoed by Herman.
"It was pretty humbling to have a limited amount of money to give away when the need is so great," Herman said. "There are just so many fantastic programs and fantastic nonprofit agencies that reside in each of the communities."
To ensure that each host community is represented equally, the funding proposals are reviewed separately by area.
"Since the donations come from faculty and staff on all our campuses, we're very careful to make sure that we are dividing the money up so that organizations in all of our communities benefit from those gifts," Rubel said.
Among the ten grants awarded to Somerville organizations, a $1,000 grant to the Somerville Homeless Coalition will go towards the purchase of a walk-in refrigeration unit and freezer.
The Somerville Homeless Coalition applied for a grant after a community health research class at Tufts found that the program's food pantry, Project SOUP, lacked the means to provide healthy food to its clients; not because it lacked a source for donations of fruits and vegetables, but because it had no place to store them, according to Executive Director of the Somerville Homeless Coalition Mark Alston-Follansbee.
"In this process of trying to understand food and security we've come to realize that to do a better job, we need to provide healthier food," he told the Daily. "So we've been working for a year and a half now to put a walk-in cooler and freezer at the pantry. We have access to all of the fresh vegetables that we could take; we've just never had any place to put them."
"We've really learned a lot in this process working with this [Tufts community health] class about what the real needs are, and we're doing everything we can to try to meet those needs," he added.
The Community Cupboard Food Pantry of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Medford and the Saint James emergency relief food bank in Grafton, which are the two largest individual beneficiaries, each received $2000 in grants.
Outside the Lines Studio, an arts-based alternative day program in Medford for individuals with physical and developmental disabilities, received $500 to purchase additional materials for their Zen room, which is another project born out of a research relationship with Tufts students, according to Outside the Lines Director Else Eaton.
The Zen room, a designated quiet creative space, was designed by students from the engineering and occupational therapy departments at Tufts. The grant will enable the studio to buy supplies that will make the room complete, Eaton said.
Apple Tree Arts, a nonprofit community school for the arts in Grafton, received $570 to purchase glockenspiels and xylophones for their focus on German music, according to Education Director Jan Barlow.
Barlow is enthusiastic about the relationships fostered between Tufts and its surrounding community by TNSF's support of local organizations.
"We feel that Tufts' participation in servicing these children really puts us together as a community of science and art," she said.
