After nearly eight decades of fundraising for nonprofits that benefit east Clark County residents in need, the Camas-Washougal Community Chest has hit a new high.
The organization, formed in 1946 to assist Camas-Washougal charitable organizations, announced this month that it has set two new records in 2025 and will award grants totaling $154,550 to 39 nonprofits.
“It is both a record number of grants and a record in terms of total dollars awarded,” Community Chest board member Richard Reiter said.
The Community Chest’s 2025 grant recipients include several organizations that benefit low-income families in east Clark County through direct assistance with food, housing costs, transportation and other basic needs.
“The grants will fund such diverse services as emergency food assistance, aid to families in crisis or needing emergency services, safe temporary shelter for at-risk youth, a Safe Stay overnight car park program at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church and water quality monitoring in the Lacamas Creek watershed,” the Community Chest stated in a news release announcing the 2025 grant recipients.
The organization said its 2025 grants will impact more than 75,000 individuals in Camas and Washougal. It credited its partners, the Camas-Washougal Rotary Foundation and the Camas Lions Foundation, as well as its donors — including Georgia-Pacific Camas paper mill, city of Camas, city of Washougal, Camas School District and Port of Camas-Washougal employees — for its record-breaking fundraising in 2025.
Books to kids
Of the 39 grant recipients, four are first-timers, and two of those new grant recipients are working to get books to children in marginalized areas of Camas and Washougal.
Laura Sheppard, founder and executive director of Little Wings Library, works as a paraeducator inside Dorothy Fox Elementary School’s library and has seen firsthand the impacts of connecting children with books they love to read.
“Their world expands,” Sheppard said. “And I’ve seen their behavior change. They have a sense of belonging, a sense of connection.”
Sheppard’s Little Wings Library nonprofit hopes to foster children’s love of reading through wooden “little libraries” built by Discovery High School students. Little Wings will fill the libraries with children’s books and place them in strategic locations to attract children who may not otherwise have access to free books.
The Community Chest granted Little Wings Library $2,500 to fund the construction of three little libraries and to purchase enough youth and teen books to keep the libraries stocked with a minimum of 150 books.
The flagship Little Wings Library, expected to open in the fall, will be placed near the newly revamped playground inside Camas’ historic Crown Park. A second library will be housed outside the Camas School District’s Jack, Will and Rob Center, with a third library available inside Restored and Revived, a Vancouver organization that helps families impacted by substance abuse and incarceration.
Sheppard, who created the nonprofit to honor her late mother’s love of reading to her children and grandchildren, said she wants the Little Wings Library books to circulate through the community for many years.
“I say I want them to flutter through the community,” Sheppard said. Her group’s motto is “Read it. Love it. Return it.”
Another new Community Chest grant recipient also plans to improve Camas-Washougal children’s access to free books.
Melissa Peake, the owner of Bookish, an independent downtown Camas bookshop that will soon move into the former Acorn and the Oak restaurant space next to Lacamas Lake in northeast Camas, applied for a Community Chest grant through Bookish’s new nonprofit arm.
Peake plans to use her $3,500 grant to retrofit a “traveling library” that will bring free children’s books to parks, schools, markets, health clinics and multifamily housing developments in east Clark County to, as Peake put it, provide “joyful access to literature.”
A mother of three with a fourth on the way, Peake said she and her family always loved the Camas School District’s BookMoBus, a traveling book library that stopped at a different elementary school each week during the summer months to provide children greater access to books.
When the district halted the BookMoBus program two years ago, Peake began to brainstorm ways she might be able to fill the gap and landed on a traveling library concept that would provide free books to children whose families may not be able to buy books or visit the local library.
“As important as libraries are, it’s also important that kids have ownership (of the books) and get to pick out their own books,” Peake said.
