WINDHAM, Maine — For nonprofit leaders like Ekhlas Ahmed, it may be hard to know where to start. But once you get a good mentor, the sky is the limit.
"Now we have an amazing board, I've learned how to make a budget for my nonprofit," Ahmed said.
Ahmed and her family immigrated from Sudan in 2004. She got her education here in Maine and decided she wanted to start her nonprofit Chance to Advance to try and elevate the voices of immigrants.
"We created our first calendar called 'Celebrating Africa,'" she said of the first calendar five years ago.
Not only does the calendar highlight immigrants living in Maine, but the money it raises is also vital to the nonprofit's mission.
"I want people to purchase as many as possible because we actually use the proceeds for refugee scholarships who are going into college," Ahmed added.
Chance to Advance got a grant from the Maine Community Foundation.
"We were trying to come up with something we could do to really support the leaders of color in the nonprofit community," Leila DeAndrade of Maine Community Foundation said about the grant.
The program provides nonprofit leaders one-on-one coaching so they can focus on whatever it is that would help their nonprofit grow, and nonprofit leaders get paid for it.
"The leaders get paid for their time. In the nonprofit world, we often will give organizations a grant or hire a consultant, but we never pay the nonprofit for doing the work," DeAndrade said.
Ahmed wants to remind anyone out there who might be thinking about starting their own nonprofit, "Your story is worthy of telling, Your story has a lot of power and it is hard, and someday's discouraging, but I think the end results are like, endless."
The 2022 grantees include:
Ekhlas Ahmed, Chance to Advance; Sydney Avitiva-Jacques and Stacey Tran, Southern Maine Workers' Center; Chaplain Eddie Green Burgess, Wellness Mobile; Adriana Ortiz Burnham, Presente! Maine; Yannick Bizimana, Cultivating Community; Juan Jose Castillo, Mano en Mano; Nathan Davis, Gateway Community Services Maine; Andrea Francis, Wabanaki Reach; Amina Hassan, Her Safety Net; Candace Johnson, AK Health and Social Services; Beatrice Mucyo, Intercultural Community Center; Stacy Perez, Maine Inside Out; Yvette Unezase, Maine Association for New Americans; and Desiree Vargas, Racial Equity and Justice.