Wildflower Alliance

Home to the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community

Employment Supports & Career Initiatives

Career Initiatives Grant Project

lead_deirdre

Every year the Wildflower Alliance offers people in our communities the chance to apply for money to support a small business dream, creative endeavor or educational opportunity.  We’ve offered up to $2,000 for each person awarded a grant.  The project takes place over the course of 9 months and, though set up to be very independent, grantees work with our grant Coordinator or other Project Consultant.  In past years, these funds have been used for a range of projects including:

  • Setting up a small business offering technology assistance to elder folks individually and in groups.
  • Expanding the creation and sales of artwork to be featured online.
  • Establishing a car detailing business with more equipment, supplies and advertising.
  • Completing an intensive yoga teacher training to become a certified yoga instructor for folks who live with trauma.
  • Getting talk-to-type technology to help write and publish stories.

What’s unique about our Career Initiatives Grant Project is that each grantee has access to big dreams but little access to conventional financing or funds to make these dreams reality.  One grantee shared that with a fixed income barely providing for enough food each day this grant–which helped them start a small business they’d dreamed of for years–meant they had a future to look towards with excitement rather than dread.

2023 Career Initiatives Education Fund Application
(For New applicants)
Career Initiatives Re-Application
(If you have applied before)

E-mail Tokyo at tokyo@wildfloweralliance.org for a Word version.

Employment Support

The Wildflower Alliance partners with people as possible to look for resources, explore and try out new ideas, and develop related skills.  

The Wildflower Alliance partners with people as possible to look for resources, explore and try out new ideas, and develop related skills. 

Sometimes these activities occur through more formal groups and workshops, and other times they happen through individual peer-to-peer support and connections made in community.

In some instances, the local community has played a role in supporting people who have been successful in developing their own small businesses, recording original music, and creating and displaying artwork.  Many have also moved on to a variety of competitive employment positions based, in part, on skills learned and supports received through the Wildflower Alliance.   The fundamental values underlying all our work in this area includes:

  • Self-determination
  • Increasing access to opportunity
  • The importance of valued roles in healing and in life
  • The individual as the expert on themselves

Building bridges to community

Ultimately, we believe that each person’s inspiration, creativity, passion, goals and interests can guide them to the roles that will have the most meaning and impact in their lives, and that employment supports needn’t be limited to only those options that seem obvious in the moment.