The West Plains Safety Alliance, a collaboration between more than 25 companies, agencies, municipalities and Tribal governments, recently honored four West Plains Champions of Children for their work in the community.
The non-profit organizations that each received a check for $500 are Kingdom Wrestling, Communities in Schools of Spokane County, Martin Hall Juvenile Detention Center and Youth Against Dating and Domestic Abuse.
Alise Mnati, grant administrator for the Airway Heights Police Department and the City of Airway Heights, helps organize the Safety Alliance and brings partners together to manage grants that benefit the community. The Safety Alliance has helped get grant funding to pay for school family nights, community food drives, internet safety classes for students and a walk for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons of WA.
The Safety Alliance was founded by the Airway Heights Police Department in 2020, when Mnati first started writing grants part-time. She was hired as a full-time grant administrator a little over a year ago. In addition to writing the grants, she makes sure the grants are distributed properly. “Once we get a grant, I have to help manage it,” she said.
Mnati said it became clear when she first started doing grant writing for the city that they would be more successful at getting grants if there were community partners. “We are a very small community,” she said. “We’re too tiny to compete against big cities.”
The city and other organizations involved take turns being the grantee depending on who is giving the grant and what it is for. “We look at the budget and determine as a group where it goes,” she said.
So far the effort has been successful. Mnati said she estimates organizations in the communities of Airway Heights, Cheney and Medical Lake have received more than $3.5 million in grant funding since last year.
Not every alliance member will receive money from each grant. The grants are written for a specific purpose and/or project in mind. But Mnati said that doesn’t stop the other agencies from being involved. “Every time I write a grant, they write letters of support, even if they’re not getting the funding,” she said. “Not every agency fits a grant scope.”
The four organizations honored with the Champions of Children award are examples of organizations that have fully supported grant requests for others but have not yet received a grant for themselves, Mnati said. She said the cash awards were given in part to show support for their community efforts.
Kingdom Wrestling is a community youth wrestling program hosted by Heights Church in Airway Heights and the award will help fund that program. Martin Hall needed new instruments for its music program, Mnati said, and Youth Against Dating and Domestic Abuse plans to use its award to fund a scholarship prize given in an upcoming essay contest. Communities in Schools of Spokane County has a site coordinator at participating schools in Spokane County that help provide necessities such as food, clothing and school supplies to students in need. Their award money will be used to help students in the Cheney School District.
The Safety Alliance also honored Joey Alwine, the manager of the Airway Heights Wal-Mart store, for his community support. Alwine, who was recently transferred to a store in north Spokane, has been a longtime supporter of the Safety Alliance and the community, Mnati said.
“We wanted to make sure we recognized him,” she said. “He went above and beyond. We’re going to miss him a lot.”
Every year Alwine would donate $5,000 to the police department’s Shop with First Responders event. He also approached Mnati about making a donation to wildfire recovery efforts last summer and she pointed him toward Re*Imagine Medical Lake, which has been handling much of the donations being distributed to community members. At first Alwine was considering a $20,000 donation from his store, but after he learned about all the needs of those who had lost their homes, he went bigger, arranging for a $150,000 donation.
“He went to the (Wal-Mart) Foundation,” Mnati said. “He went to corporate and advocated for that.”
Mnati said she enjoys finding grants that will help fund projects in the community. She said it takes work to find the right fit between need and funding source. “You can’t just write for every grant,” she said. “It’s matchmaking. It’s fun. When you get one it feels really good.”
An effort is also made not to compete against other organizations offering the same or similar services. “We’re going to go after money to support services we already have and expand capacity,” she said.
Mnati said she’s currently working on a project to get funding for a domestic violence victim support caseworker specific to the West Plains, since some people find it difficult to find transportation to Spokane. While that’s a big ask, the Alliance has also done things as simple as providing buses to transport local students to a youth summit being held in Spokane. “Sometimes it’s the little things and sometimes it’s the big things,” she said.
