(Jennifer Scott/Tyler Morning Telegraph)

The Women’s Fund of Smith County (WFSC) awarded $278,334 to four local nonprofit agencies during its 2025 Grants Announcement event Tuesday evening at Willow Brook Country Club in Tyler.

“This was an evening to really celebrate a lot of hard work and to celebrate the generosity and the impact of our members and what they’re able to do just by being a part of a giving circle,” said Zoe Lawhorn, President/CEO of the Women’s Fund of Smith County.

The WFSC was created in 2007 as a collective giving circle. As members of the organization, over 360 women benefit from education on community issues and best practices in philanthropy and participate in the annual grants process through their annual pledge dollars and their votes.

“We go through and do a lot of due diligence to be sure that the projects we ultimately give grants to are gonna be successful, sustainable, and meet the mission of our organization, which is enriching the lives of women and children in Smith County,” Lawhorn said.

Since the collective giving circle was founded in 2007, the Women’s Fund has awarded $3,572,468 to over 30 Smith County nonprofits.

“The grant-making process is the heart and primary focus of our organization,” said Smittee Root, 2025 WFSC Board Chair, in a press release. “Each member has a voice through her giving and her vote for the grants we award each year.”

East Texas Crisis Center

The East Texas Crisis Center (ETCC) received a grant award of $79,640 to help establish its first transitional housing program for survivors of domestic violence in Smith County. The Transitional Housing Program (THP) will include rental assistance and services to support women and children fleeing domestic violence. THP will address the biggest challenge for the majority of survivors; access to affordable housing and the needed services required to rebuild their lives and sustain a violence free future.

“We decided that we would start to launch housing programs like this transitional housing program to make it possible for families to have a violence-free future, to make it possible for women to escape the violence and stay away and not have to go back,” said Nichole Henry, Executive Director of the East Texas Crisis Center.

According to Henry, 70 percent of the women in Smith County who are in domestic violence situations end up staying there because they have nowhere else to go.

“One of my favorite musicals growing up was The Wiz,” Henry told the crowd. “And at the end, Diana Ross, playing Dorothy, sings a song about going home and she says, ‘home is a place where love is overflowing.’ But for so many of the women and children that we serve, home hasn’t been that place. So at the East Texas Crisis Center, we’re able to provide traditional housing, we can help change what home looks like.”

The mission of the East Texas Crisis Center is to provide safety, shelter and education to victims of family violence, sexual assault, dating violence and other violent crime, and to restore dignity and purpose in their lives while promoting public compassion and awareness to reduce violence in the community.

Hope Haven of East Texas

Hope Haven of East Texas was given the grant award of $68,640. This grant will provide funding to enable Hope Haven to expand its child placing agency and improve office space so that the agency can better care for foster and adoptive families. Hope Haven will use the funds to create a multi-purpose meeting and training space to license families, and a dedicated room to provide counseling services.

“What you may not realize is that currently in northeast Texas we are only able to provide care for approximately 50% of our own children who are in the foster care system,” said Jamie Sanders, Executive Director of Hope Haven. “So that means that on any given day in our community, half of our kids are being sent elsewhere to find a safe and stable home and that’s not OK.”

According to Sanders, children fall through the cracks every day. When examining the statistics surrounding teenagers and older children, as well as sibling groups, it becomes evident that many of these young individuals in the community have heightened needs. These needs are often compounded by the trauma they have endured.

“The numbers are even more staggering,” she said. “In our community once a child reaches age 7, the opportunities to find a safe home begin to plummet and when you get to the age of a teenager, we’re only currently able to serve 1 out of every 4 of our youth. Hope Haven exists to serve those children, we are fighting to close that gap in foster care in our community.”

Hope Haven of East Texas demonstrates Christ’s love to forgotten children and teens in the foster care system by providing home, healing, and hope because every child deserves to be safe and equipped for the future.

“The heart of the Women’s Fund is that we collectively come together as a community to enrich well to fund organizations that are enriching the lives of women and children in our community,” Sanders said. “I just wanna say that Hope Haven of East Texas is 100% in line with that desire and are very, very proud that the Women’s Fund has chosen to partner with us in that mission.”

Mosaic Counseling Centers of East Texas

The Mosaic Counseling Centers of East Texas was awarded $100,000 which will empower the organization to expand its youth and family services to meet the growing demand for child mental health care in Smith County. Funding will be used to hire a full-time licensed provider to serve more youth and family clients; ensure sustainability by enabling contracts with new insurance providers; add a staff member to the client services team to support new clients, manage billing, and ensure compliance; and provide resources for dedicated therapy spaces.

“While we all know that there is so much about this community to be thankful for and to celebrate, there is so much that we can continue doing so that every person who lives in Smith County, every child and every woman can access the support that they need to thrive,” said Katherine Chapman, LPC-S, Director of Client Care, youth and family for the Mosaic Counseling Centers of East Texas.

According to Chapman, Texas ranks near last in access to children’s mental health services.

“That is a sobering statistic,” she said. “This means that children in our state, children in our community, children right here in Tyler struggle to access mental health services when they need them the most.”

Mosaic Counseling Centers of East Texas exist to build a healthier community by uniting mind, body, and spirit through counseling, connection and community, honoring individual beliefs and practices.

Unbound Now

Unbound Now received $30,000 to expand its 24/7 crisis response and case management services for commercially sexually exploited youth into Smith County. Unbound Now’s three Smith County advocates operate a 24/7 crisis response line and provide emotional support and emergency assistance such as clothes, toiletries, and personal items for youth when they are recovered from trafficking.

“A number of years ago I met a young 14 year old that was trafficked in Smith County and after she told me her story, I’ll never forget what she said to me because I had been hearing about how many kids were being trafficked in this area,” said Susan Peters, founder and interim CEO of Unbound Now. “I said ‘why are there so many there?’ And she said ‘because nobody is looking for us.’”

Unbound Now works to end human trafficking in every community. The organization’s aim is to fight for the protection of the vulnerable, identify the exploited, and advocate for survivors on their path to restoration.

“We love working with all of our partners like the district attorney’s office, the juvenile detention center, Homeland Security, the FBI, Tyler Police Department, the Fostering Collective, Child Advocacy Center, and many others,” Peters said. “Because it takes all of us coming around these young people to support them and to help them get their life back.”

About the Women’s Fund grant process

The Women’s Fund of Smith County believes together is better. Through collective giving, members of the Women’s Fund transform their community by funding programs that enrich the lives of women and children.

Collective giving enables the Women’s Fund to leverage the philanthropic capacity of individual members and create a truly impactful fund of philanthropic dollars. Through its membership model, the WFSC empowers women to make transformative gifts to the community.

“To see that this many women come together because they care about the community… I am very impressed by the Women’s Fund of Smith County,” Henry said. “People always ask me ‘what does it mean to have community support?’ It tells the survivors that they’re not alone and for them to see that there’s hundreds of women in Smith County that have their back, I think there’s no other support like it.”

The annual Grants Announcement marks the culmination of the organization’s yearly grants process. As individuals, members pledge their annual gifts; together, members award impact grants to nonprofits. All grant recipients are thoroughly vetted during an extensive grants review process conducted by a volunteer Grants Committee, so every WFSC member can trust that her dollars are being used effectively to enrich the lives of women and children in Smith County.

“It’s just really interesting to me to see how all of these agencies with such different missions and such different focal points for their services really do a lot to support that same type of thing for their clients, which is healing,” Lawhorn said. “We’re just very excited to be a part of that and to do what we can to help them move forward, expand the services that they have, and then create new programs to meet even newer populations.”

Membership is open to any woman with a giving heart. For more information on the Women’s Fund of Smith County, please visit www.womensfundsc.org.