The J.M. Kaplan Innovation Prize supports America’s most promising social entrepreneurs – people working to solve society’s most urgent challenges from prosthetics for kids to jobs and education for unemployed coal miners. The J.M. Kaplan Fund selected twenty grantees since 2015. Winners received multi-year support for their visionary ideas. The winners are selected from thousands of applicants from every corner of the country
J.M. Kaplan tapped Weintraub Communications and Silverbee to amplify the profile of the prize and the fledgling nonprofits they selected. We worked with all ten winners including Reclaim Appalachia founder Brandon Dennison whose work and award were featured in West Virginia news outlets and national media including NPR’s Here and Now. Reclaim Appalachia addresses the interconnected economic, cultural, and environmental distress of West Virginia’s collapsing coal economy. Reclaim Appalachia’s mission is to hire unemployed young adults to rehabilitate formerly industrial and other derelict buildings as affordable housing and cultural anchors, while at the same time offering community college credits and life-skills training.
The 2019 Innovation Prize winners will come from the largest ever pool of applicants. The third class of biannual grantees will be announced in November.