The Looser-Flake Charitable Foundation awarding nearly $200,000 in grant funding to the Mercer County and Sherrard school districts. With the funding, Sherrard plans to take multiple approaches to its commitment to innovation, from outfitting an innovation lab for junior high and high school students to providing ongoing teacher training. Mercer County will use the grant funds for its vocational modernization initiative.
For the last four years, the Looser-Flake Foundation has granted over $600,000 to educational technology projects in support of the Mercer County Better Together Action Plan’s aim to strengthen supplemental education opportunities for Mercer County students. While the combined funds requested by the Sherrard and Mercer school districts exceeded the original budget for this year’s education grant program, Looser-Flake’s trustees found the requests so compelling that they fully funded both.
The Looser-Flake Charitable Foundation is a private foundation started in 2013 to serve charitable causes in Mercer County. Dorothy Looser-Flake and Roberta Looser were sisters who were born and raised on a family farm near New Boston Township. They cared deeply about the community that gave them so much growing up and left a portion of their estates to establish the charitable foundation to support the region. Between 2015 and 2017, the Looser-Flake Charitable Foundation awarded more than half a million dollars to advance economic development and improve education in Mercer County.