In an initial round of grants to Spokane-area nonprofits, the Umpqua Bank Charitable Foundation has awarded a total of $420,000 to Second Harvest Food Bank of the Inland Northwest and Excelerate Success, says Eve Callahan, an Umpqua spokeswoman.

The awards will be distributed by the Roseburg, Ore.-based bank’s foundation to the nonprofits over the course of three years, Callahan says.

Through a $300,000 grant, Second Harvest will launch a new program to ensure food security at three elementary schools in low-income neighborhoods in Spokane County, Callahan says. By combining access to food over weekends, supplemental food distributions through mobile food banks, and in-class snacks, the goal is to enhance academic success for individual students and the schools overall, she says.

Jason Clark, executive director of Second Harvest, says Lidgerwood Elementary School, on Spokane’s North Side, is one of the schools that will benefit from the grants, and the other schools likely will be selected this month.

“The choices likely will include a suburban school and a rural school, so we get different environments to measure results from,” Clark says, adding, “The program itself will work on answering the questions: What happens when we make sure that all of the kids in a low-income school are food-secure, and what impact will that have on their ability to learn and attend school and succeed?”

The grant award is among the largest recent private contributions to Second Harvest, he says.

“It’s a very big grant in our world,” he says. “We don’t often have the opportunity to invest this much in a pilot project.”

Amy McGreevy, executive director of Excelerate Success, says the grant from the Umpqua foundation will focus on early learning, especially kindergarten readiness.

Excelerate Success is a countywide partnership involving businesses, government agencies, educators, and members of the community, McGreevy says. 

“We’ve created a network of stakeholders across communities interested in moving the needle on number of children entering kindergarten,” she says.

About half of the children entering kindergarten in Spokane County don’t meet state standard for readiness, McGreevy says.

The grant will be used toward readiness efforts in the neighborhoods surrounding Bemis Elementary, in Hillyard; Sunset Elementary, in Airway Heights; and Grant Elementary, in the South Perry neighborhood, she says.

Umpqua Bank created the foundation in April and committed $10 million in initial funding for it when the bank’s Portland-based parent company Umpqua Holdings Corp. acquired the assets of former Spokane-based Sterling Bank.

In all, the foundation awarded grants totaling $900,000, with the two large grants going to charities here in Sterling’s home county and two other large grants in Umpqua’s home county of Douglas County, Ore.

In choosing the grant areas and recipients, the foundation looked at areas with the greatest need within the bank’s footprint and targeted successful organizations with youth and education programs in need of support, Callahan says.

The foundation expands on Umpqua’s longtime charitable emphasis on youth and education, she says. 

“We see a strong correlation between educational opportunities and economic prosperity,” she says.

The foundation, which the bank will continue to fund, also will take over the funding of Umpqua’s ongoing Community Giving grants, which typically range from $2,500 to 10,000. Grants are available to nonprofit organizations within Umpqua’s service areas in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and California, Callahan says.

Umpqua also encourages its employees to invest in their communities through the bank’s Connect Volunteer Network, which provides every Umpqua employee with up to 40 hours of paid time off each year to volunteer. In 2013 alone, 82 percent of Umpqua employees participated in the volunteer program, contributing 43,000 hours to organizations across the bank’s footprint.