After practically eight a long time of fundraising for nonprofits that profit east Clark County residents in want, the Camas-Washougal Neighborhood Chest has hit a brand new excessive.
The group, shaped in 1946 to help Camas-Washougal charitable organizations, introduced this month that it has set two new information in 2025 and can award grants totaling $154,550 to 39 nonprofits.
“It is both a record number of grants and a record in terms of total dollars awarded,” Neighborhood Chest board member Richard Reiter stated.
The Neighborhood Chest’s 2025 grant recipients embrace a number of organizations that profit low-income households in east Clark County via direct help with meals, housing prices, transportation and different primary wants.
The group stated its 2025 grants will impression greater than 75,000 people in Camas and Washougal. It credited its companions, the Camas-Washougal Rotary Basis and the Camas Lions Basis, in addition to its donors — together with Georgia-Pacific Camas paper mill, metropolis of Camas, metropolis of Washougal, Camas College District and Port of Camas-Washougal staff — for its record-breaking fundraising in 2025.
Books to children
Of the 39 grant recipients, 4 are first-timers, and two of these new grant recipients are working to get books to kids in marginalized areas of Camas and Washougal.
Laura Sheppard, founder and government director of Little Wings Library, works as a paraeducator inside Dorothy Fox Elementary College’s library and has seen firsthand the impacts of connecting kids with books they like to learn.
“Their world expands,” Sheppard stated. “And I’ve seen their behavior change. They have a sense of belonging, a sense of connection.”
Sheppard’s Little Wings Library nonprofit hopes to foster kids’s love of studying via picket “little libraries” constructed by Discovery Excessive College college students. Little Wings will fill the libraries with kids’s books and place them in strategic places to draw kids who could not in any other case have entry to free books.
The Neighborhood Chest granted Little Wings Library $2,500 to fund the development of three little libraries and to buy sufficient youth and teenage books to maintain the libraries stocked with a minimal of 150 books.
The flagship Little Wings Library, anticipated to open within the fall, might be positioned close to the newly revamped playground inside Camas’ historic Crown Park. A second library might be housed outdoors the Camas College District’s Jack, Will and Rob Middle, with a 3rd library accessible inside Restored and Revived, a Vancouver group that helps households impacted by substance abuse and incarceration.
Sheppard, who created the nonprofit to honor her late mom’s love of studying to her kids and grandchildren, stated she desires the Little Wings Library books to flow into via the group for a few years.
“I say I want them to flutter through the community,” Sheppard stated. Her group’s motto is “Read it. Love it. Return it.”
One other new Neighborhood Chest grant recipient additionally plans to enhance Camas-Washougal kids’s entry to free books.
Melissa Peake, the proprietor of Bookish, an unbiased downtown Camas bookshop that can quickly transfer into the previous Acorn and the Oak restaurant house subsequent to Lacamas Lake in northeast Camas, utilized for a Neighborhood Chest grant via Bookish’s new nonprofit arm.
Peake plans to make use of her $3,500 grant to retrofit a “traveling library” that can deliver free kids’s books to parks, colleges, markets, well being clinics and multifamily housing developments in east Clark County to, as Peake put it, present “joyful access to literature.”
A mom of three with a fourth on the way in which, Peake stated she and her household at all times liked the Camas College District’s BookMoBus, a touring guide library that stopped at a special elementary college every week in the course of the summer season months to supply kids higher entry to books.
When the district halted the BookMoBus program two years in the past, Peake started to brainstorm methods she would possibly be capable of fill the hole and landed on a touring library idea that would offer free books to kids whose households could not be capable of purchase books or go to the native library.
“As important as libraries are, it’s also important that kids have ownership (of the books) and get to pick out their own books,” Peake stated.
