By Monica Fragale
Contributing Writer

The stories are different, but the impact is the same – grants awarded each year by the Mushroom Festival continue to help community organizations make a difference in Chester County.

Max’s Kicks for Kids, for example, teamed with another grant recipient – Mighty Writers – to buy 1,000 pairs of new sneakers for children in need.

The Kennett Square Police Department used its grant to continue with an online policy program that helps them meet best practices with state and federal standards.

A Child’s Light and New London Counseling Center used their respective grants to help offer mental health treatment for those who might not be able to afford it.

Longwood and Kennett Fire Companies are using their respective grants to build firefighters a gym in the Kennett station, ensuring that emergency personnel can stay in peak physical shape.

And Po-Mar-Lin Fire Company is using its grant to improve its ability to fight the dozens of vegetation fires it gets called to each year.

These and 30 other organizations received grants from the Mushroom Festival earlier this year. Recipients included fire and ambulance companies, organizations that help with food insecurity and housing, an assisted living facility and nursing home, an ambulance service, nonprofits that help with mental and physical health needs, historical and open space preservation, and groups that help children, among others.

“We gave almost $200,000 away this year, which was our biggest year for grants,” Mushroom Festival President Gina Puoci said. That represents almost double the amount of grant money -- $110,000 – awarded in 2024.

And everyone involved in the Mushroom Festival – from the approximately 100,000 visitors each year to the vendors who sell their wares, to the restaurants and other groups that sell food, drinks and tasty treats, to the companies that sponsor the festival, and everyone else – has a hand in making the grant program as beneficial as it is, according to Puoci.

“The money that we raise from entrance fees and wristband fees, and the money left after all the bills are paid, helps fund these grants,” she said.

Kennett Square Police Chief William Holdsworth said the grant has been “incredibly beneficial to us,” explaining that the department switched three years ago to an online policy platform program called Lexipol that regularly incorporates the changes in law into the department’s policies.

The grant allows the police department to continue with Lexipol.

“It’s state-of-the-art,” he said. “Compared to what our policies were years ago, it’s night and day.”

The program, for example, allows Kennett’s officers to incorporate policies that have been proven effective in other departments nationwide.

Another beneficiary, the West Grove-based Max’s Kicks for Kids, credited the Mushroom Festival grant this year with helping them to purchase 1,000 pairs of new sneakers for kids, including for those in fellow grant recipient Mighty Writers El Futuro Kennett program.

In mid-July, Tom and Lynn Engle, the president and vice president of Max’s Kicks for Kids and the parents of the organization’s namesake, met with two groups of kids from Mighty Writers at the Adidas shoe outlet in Lancaster.

“They went and got measured for shoes,” Lynn Engle said. “It was cool to be able to be a part of that.”

“The Mushroom Festival has really helped us,” Tom Engle said.

“This is truly a passion project,” Lynn added.

In addition to Mighty Writers El Futuro Kennett, Max’s Kicks for Kids works with groups helping kids, ensuring those children can experience the same joy of getting new sneakers that the Engles’ son, Max, did throughout his life.

“He was a sneaker fanatic,” Tom said about his son Max, who was a probation officer for Chester County who died in 2018. “Lynn and I both realized that sneakers are more than just foot coverings; they’re building kids’ confidence.”

For New London Counseling Center, the support they receive from the Mushroom Festival and other organizations is what allows them to help offer mental health treatment for anyone.

“We could not do what we do without support from the community,” said Dr. Katie Bowman, one of the founding members of the Lincoln University-based organization. “Our model is that anyone can receive care. We have never, in six years, told anybody they can’t have care.”

Grant funds help offset the cost of care.

“We have about 150 clients or so at any given point in time, and about half of them are receiving help,” Bowman said.

Helping to make mental health treatment more accessible is also the benefit of another Mushroom Festival grant. A Child’s Light, based in Downingtown, used their grant to help pay some of the more than 100 private therapists who work with their clients.

“This is our second year getting a donation from the Mushroom Festival,” A Child’s Light founder Leslie Holt said. “The money goes into our account and goes right back out to a therapist.”

She said the group’s mission is that all children, “no matter what the circumstances are … should have access to trauma-informed, private therapy.”

“Anywhere we get a donation, we are just so appreciative because it just literally saves these kids’ lives,” she said.

The grants that Longwood and Kennett fire companies received will go toward creating an updated fitness area at the Kennett fire station with equipment geared toward the needs of the emergency personnel, according to Kennett Regional Fire Chief A.J. McCarthy. One of the Kennett firefighters met with a fitness consultant about the right type of equipment to order, and the grants will allow the fire companies to begin to work on that dedicated fitness area.

Po-Mar-Lin Fire Company, also a part of the Kennett Regional Fire Department, received a Mushroom Festival grant this year to help its firefighters continue to combat vegetation fires.

“The Po-Mar-Lin grant we’re using to outfit one of their vehicles to handle more of the natural vegetation fires,” McCarthy said, adding that without the grant, the project to replace the brush unit would have remained unfunded. “We handle a lot (of those fires) in the spring season – I think we did 40 in a span of about six weeks” over the spring.

“We’re really thankful for the Mushroom Festival grant,” McCarthy added, noting that the grants allow fire department priorities to be funded when they would not normally be. “It helps more than people realize. With only getting about 40 percent of our budget funded through municipalities, we have to come up with the other 60 percent. It allows us to get some funding back into those priorities that otherwise would just sit.”

For the Union Fire Company No. 1 of Oxford, the Mushroom Festival grant they received will allow for their board room to be re-carpeted, according to an article on the fire company’s website.

For more information on the Mushroom Festival grants and a full list of recipients, go online at mushroomfestival.org/beneficiaries.