A recent Gates Educational Advancement Grant distributed via Inland Empire Community Foundation is giving one local nonprofit a stellar opportunity to enhance its work around educational justice.
Recipient BLU Educational Foundation, which has long been promoting healthy, productive communities through educational and human services programming, will use those valued resources for staff support and creating deeper connections with young people.
“We’re excited about this grant because it allows us to also bring young people into the fold so that they, too, have a voice and can advocate for the issues that affect them,” said BLU Educational Foundation President and CEO Dina Walker. “We’re already gearing up to build out our student leadership cohort so these young people can begin to advocate for the issues, not only on their campus, but in their community and then also statewide.” 
“We’ve got at least eight schools in the Inland Empire on board,” she added. “We’ve also started our civic engagement internship. And thank goodness for this grant, because it’s allowed us to build on our internship for advocacy for college students.”
The Foundation’s impact is considerable. It has long provided educational and human services programming to youth, adults, and organizations to build healthy, productive communities.
It does that through various means of advancing opportunities such as civic engagement, assistance with college and career access, leadership development, artistic and cultural opportunities, Black Agenda education, and overseeing the launch of the Uhuru Education Project, an initiative designed to open a charter high school founded on African-centered principles.
“It’s important for us to help build the voices of students and have them being players in shaping their own kind of destiny,” Walker said. “The grant helps us do this locally and to also engage with young people that are doing this work across the state. This is so important now because resources are definitely have tightened up around equity.”
“We were in a position recently where we immediately lost almost half a million dollars this year, around some of the work we do,” she added.
Many nonprofits have been affected by government cuts to funding this year, but Walker remains optimistic.
“These resources help us fill the gap,” she said. “It also helps us make sure we can at least begin and or continue some of the work with our young people specifically, so they can use their voices for systemic change around educational access.”
Walker, who founded the organization after being an educational consultant for many years, says there was one important reason for her to launch the endeavor.
“As a consultant, my services were for people who could pay for them,” she said. “And I realized that I could not serve the very people that had come back to the Inland Empire, which are students like me who had been first-generation college, low-income, and had limited opportunities here.”
“And that was strictly because of finances,” she added. “I was like, ‘Okay, how do I get enough resources so that folks who can’t pay for it can benefit? There’s already money so that I can actually do this for them?’ And that was the birth of the foundation.”
Learn more at bluedfoundation.org.
This story originally appeared in the Press Enterprise, October 2025.
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