The Cambridge Community Foundation on Wednesday held its seventh annual Making Good Together celebration honoring nonprofit social innovators. Five local nonprofits received the Imagined in Cambridge! Social Innovation Awards, and $5,000 each, for their grassroots efforts to address pressing social challenges in Cambridge. It also named the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee (CEOC) as its inaugural Making Good Award winner for civic leadership. The award came with a prize of $10,000.
CEOC, an anti-poverty group, started in the 1960s. In 2022, CEOC helped run the Rise Up Cambridge scaled cash assistance program, which supported nearly 2,000 families and was the first such non-lottery citywide program of its kind in the United States.
Tina Alu, executive director of CEOC, told Cambridge Day a substantial number of Cambridge residents struggle to make ends meet. “People assume [Cambridge] is a wealthy city, and that’s challenging for people, because I do think the community would want to [help] more if they knew [about those struggling].”
At the awards event, held in Central Square at Street Theory Collective, CCF noted it had distributed $1.27 million in Community Fund grants in 2026, down slightly from $1.5 million the previous year. Some arts groups who had previously received grants from the Community Fund now are funded through the Culture Connects Cambridge initiative, which gave them $311,000 in grants, up from the $168,000 received last year through the Community Fund.
Geeta Pradhan, president of CCF, said in the face of federal funding cuts, local nonprofits have done more than just pick up the slack. “It lands on these nonprofits to step forward and meet the needs of the community, so how they have responded is phenomenal.”
Imagined in Cambridge winners
We Got Next hosts basketball and volleyball events year-round, including two co-ed youth basketball leagues during the fall. It was started by Kessen Green, Cambridge Police director of Outreach and Community Programs. Green is a lifelong Cantabrigian who grew up in The Port, said he launched it to pull kids away from their screens. “We have to find a way to ground our young people and throw them back into the real world,” he said.
Sufi Boutique offers free clothing, including interview and job-ready outfits. Mohammad Nooraee turns his business, Noor Oriental Rugs, into a free clothing store every Saturday. One of the volunteers who staff the shop, Waseem Afzaal, shared how one woman who wore clothes from the shop to an interview “told me that the respect she had gotten was something she had never experienced before. “That just gives us inspiration to further expand this,” he said.
The Rebirth festival was started by Elmer Martinez when he was a junior at Emerson College, after the school’s response to a 2017 protest by students of color created tensions. Martinez took a production management class project to conceive an event and created a hip-hop dance jam that drew students from across the country. It’s grown into a two-day festival of live music performed by local artists, spoken word performances, the dance jam and other events, hosted at The Foundry for the last three years.
“I was already break dancing and going to events all over Boston, so I saw Rebirth as an opportunity to revitalize the black culture on campus,” said Martinez. This scope has now expanded to an entire city.
Mpowerment Labs will start up this fall and will provide local middle schools with in-depth, interactive programming on menstrual health. It is an expansion of Cambridge mom Erin Dullea’s Mpower nonprofit, which organizes “Period Parties” at elementary schools across Cambridge, Boston and Somerville to educate young people as they go through some of their biggest physical and mental changes. She co-founded the nonprofit with fellow Cambridge mom Liz Stott. Mpower also provides schools with menstrual health supplies and services.
Dullea started Mpower because of her own personal experiences of “growing up without a lot of knowledge around my body.” As a mom, she has recognized that, “there’s still very limited [puberty] education in schools for youth, as their bodies are starting to change.”
Paint Your Truth was started a decade ago by Vie Ciné to provide a space where people who have suffered trauma or abuse could paint their pain onto a canvas.
Ciné holds mobile workshops offering both one-on-one and group sessions.
“Some people may not feel comfortable about their trauma that they’ve experienced, but [when creating this] I thought anybody could put paint to a canvas and let that picture speak for them,” said Ciné. She said Paint Your Truth will use its award to offer the workshops for Cambridge mothers of color and caregivers, in partnership with Cambridge Families of Color Coalition and the Cambridge Public Library.
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