Take a deeper dive into Foundations and public/private funders to find out their areas of interest, priorities, and some tips when submitting a grant to their organizations. These are invaluable to discovering if the Funder is a right match for your nonprofit organization. Current CGG subscribers are able to access these events for FREE and also given first access to registering. The sessions are limited, so take advantage today!

El Pomar Video Transcript

Erica Oakley-Courage: So, we have what I call three essay questions. We kind of want to know your history. It does not, we don’t need to know every executive director, every office change, a narrative, what are you doing and how are you doing it? And then evaluation methods. We could not put in like a one-size fits all. So, we want to know how do you define success? Um, that’s kind of the narrative or excuse me, the essay question requirements. And then we have pretty basic attachments. We’re looking for three years of financials, an organization budget, a list of board members, and a list of support you have received um from outside your organization. If you are submitting a request for a program or capital grant, we’re also going to want to see project budget and a list of funders specific to that project. So again, we hope that this is really basic. I’ve received a lot of feedback that it is basic. However, if you get in there and you’re like, “This is not basic. I need help. Please let please let us know because again first we’ll help you and then we can make adjustments. But we can’t make those adjustments if we don’t hear back from you.

Video transcript of Next50 Foundation Funder Connection.

Marcy Mitchell: Good to know. And then what are the typical components of the grant application?

Kathy Plomer: So many are are typical. We’ll ask for some organizational background. We’re going to ask you to make the connection to one of our priority areas. We’ll ask you to make the connection to one of those priority populations that I mentioned, our mission align populations. We love to fund organizations that are from the community they want to serve or have a really strong relationship. We’ll ask you of course about your goals of your project. In different applications there’s a little bit different emphasis. So, in our core grant, the organizational resiliency grant, we’re going to ask you to talk about how does this project or what you’re proposing increase your organizational capacity to stay and do the work that you want to do with changing aging. We’re going to really focus on innovation. And another piece of that is partnerships, because we know that or we believe one of our is that organizations can do great things alone but they can often do even more with partners. Who are you collaborating with that you can show us you have those very strong relationships and you’re going to build off each other’s strength. So that’s that would be part of the application. We will ask a bit about budget and the need for the funds. And we  do look at that and do a bit of a financial background, but we try not to ask for too much of that kind of information. There is a bit of innovation in those two grants just because we want to just see how you’re doing things and how it’s different from maybe just how you’re proposing to do something that’s different than is you’ve done in your organization or might be a different aspect of how you approach a problem.

Video transcript with CHFA Funder Connection

Kristin Soroko: So today we’re mostly going to focus on our direct effect program. So our direct effect program is our like typical grant program. We do two rounds per year. This program was first developed in 2014 as part of our 40th anniversary and we’ve really expanded it since then. We seek to fund organizations whose mission align with ours. Our awards typically range from $5000 to $30,000 and last year our average donation was around 12,800. We will have two rounds again this year. The first application will open in April and then awardees will be announced in Late July. And then round two, the application dates are August 18th to September 12th and then we’ll be making Awards in early December. So we’ll talk a lot more about these program or this program but that’s just kind of the basic overview. So with that I’ll stop sharing and we can dive in.

Marcy Mitchell: Great thank you. So for those who are not familiar with housing uh Colorado housing, I’m just gonna say CHFA, it’s just a lot shorter. What are, I know you talked about that the Direct effects Awards align with your key funding priorities, what are those?

Kristin Soroko: So again our grant making really has to do with organizations who align with our mission, so organizations who are working to advance housing stability and economic prosperity as well as kind of we there are several issues that we think contribute to those. So we fund organizations that work in mobility, transportation, food access, health, energy and I’m forgetting one.

Marcy Mitchell: Health, energy, so kind of the social determinants of health?

Kristin Soroko: exactly yep

Video transcript with Daniel’s Fund

Marcy Mitchell: You mentioned leadership and good leadership. What is that? If you have a brand new executive director or someone that’s been in for six months, is it better for them to wait to apply to Daniel’s fund because they haven’t proven themselves as a leader yet?

Owen McAleer: So no. So leadership is a quality. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a track record. So when I meet somebody, I’m going to tell you this, and it’s really you know inside scoop, but this is what I think of. So I have like a four quadrant graph in my head. On the vertical axis, it’s passion and mostly passion. On the horizontal axis, it’s skill. And then if you split that into four quadrants, the top upper right quadrant is someone with high passion and high skill. That’s who I’m looking for to support. So the ultimate of that… I’m going to call out, as Steve Jobs. He had high passion and high skill. Now that doesn’t mean that he was always a nice guy, but he had high passion and high skill. Now on to the left of him is a zealot, someone with high passion but doesn’t have good skills.  I run into that all the time and it’s not saying it’s bad. Someone with high passion, that’s good you know, I love to see people with passion and some trying to implement programs. But if they don’t have the skill, then they need to hire someone that can implement with high skill. So they need help. Passion alone isn’t going to get you there. Now on the bottom part of the quadrant, on the far right, is a very skilled manager so they don’t have the high passion.

Video transcript with Gates Family Foundation:

Marcy Mitchell: Now what’s presented to your funders is going to just make for a more successful campaign well, and not every funder does Capital, so that’s also unique to you.

Lisa Rucker: I know, and we are seeing that. So, we’re getting about 150 applications a year, purely for Capital grants across the board, and we’re funding about a hundred of those. Our median grant size, I mean that’s reflected in our median grant size, is about $30,000. Our grant sizes range from $10,000 to $75,000. There are some exceptions in there, so sometimes if it’s really highly aligned with some of the work we’re doing on the Strategic giving side of our grant making, that could be a six figure grant. But it is just the realities of how competitive our Capital grants program is reflected in are the size of our grants these days.