Over 600 individuals receive $500 in COVID-19 relief, but demand outweighs resources

Originally seeded by a $250,000 contribution from the Midland Area Community Foundation, individual assistance provided through the COVID-19 Response Fund has financially assisted over 600 Midland County residents affected by COVID-19. In addition to the $250,000 contribution, the Midland Area Community Foundation is providing $250,000 in match funds for gifts from individuals or businesses.
The COVID-19 Response Fund was jointly established by Midland Area Community Foundation and the United Way of Midland County to assist with emerging and long-term needs of the community. Individual assistance was an initiative established by Midland Area Community Foundation.
“We have been very fortunate to work with amazing community partners such as Salvation Army and Greater Midland Community Center to facilitate effective application processing and disbursement of funds,” said Sharon Mortensen, President and CEO of the Midland Area Community Foundation. “Although over 600 individuals have already been directly assisted by the COVID-19 Relief Fund, we still have over 800 more applications to process and resources to only fulfill roughly 250 more grants.”
Individual assistance has been made possible through the generosity of numerous organizations and community members. Assistance favors individuals whose livelihood has been directly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and who do not currently have resources to assist them. MACF originally purchased 500 separate $500 prepaid debit cards, and thanks to community and organizational contributions, have been able to purchase over 350 more. The cards were sold to MACF, graciously without fees by Isabella Bank. Grant requests are processed by Salvation Army. Applications are funneled through the Salvation Army website and distribution takes place three times per week at Greater Midland Community Center.
“We really wanted to provide an opportunity for individuals who do not have access to supplemental resources due to sudden unemployment or hardship,” said Mortensen. “If the community rallies around this undertaking, we will be able to impact more of our neighbors and friends in need.”
“We appreciate the many ways the community is coming forward to help during this pandemic,” said Holly Miller, Executive Director of United Way of Midland County. “We see neighbors giving to neighbors in many ways including volunteering and giving.”
Opportunities to give can be found at midlandfoundation.org/give. A little under half of the matching funds are still available. Use the drop-down menu to select the COVID-19 Response Fund and mention in the notes section that you’d like your contribution allocated to individual assistance through the COVID-19 Response Fund.
The mission of the Midland Area Community Foundation is to provide philanthropic leadership to strengthen our community by fostering collaboration and giving today and in the future.
For further questions, you can contact the Foundation at 989-839-9661 or info@midlandfoundation.org.
Midland Area Community Foundation
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to
The form is not published.
Adding {{itemName}} to cart
Added {{itemName}} to cart