Selection Process

The foundation uses a 4 step process to select the grant applications that will be funded:

1. Qualification Step. This step is currently done by a prospective applicant before actually starting the grant application process. By reviewing our website a prospective applicant can make an assessment of whether their organization and project is something that the foundation would have any interest in funding. If you think your organization and project do qualify, then you can proceed to the next step in the process.
2. Letter Of Inquiry Step. In this step, the prospective grant applicant creates an account in the online grant application system and provides the foundation information about the organization and project to be funded. The foundation reviews the information to determine whether or not the organization and project to be funded is a good match with the mission, vision and current program areas of the foundation. The prospective grant applicant will be notified, usually within 2 weeks of the foundation’s decision. If the foundation determines that there is a good match, the prospective grant applicant is notified and asked to submit a full grant application. Having this LOI step helps save both you, the prospective applicant, and the foundation from wasting valuable time to prepare and review a full grant application that has little or no chance of being funded.
3. Application Evaluation Step. Once a full grant application has been completed, the foundation will evaluation the grant application against our grant criteria. These criteria are heavily weighted on how well the organization and project match our foundation principles and other grant evaluation criteria. The evaluation done at this step is on an individual grant application’s merits only and grants are not rejected at this point, only rated as being a better or worse “fit” to the grant criteria.
4. Board Review Step. Once all the grant applications for a given grant cycle have been evaluated, the board, at its board meeting, reviews all the grant applications. The board looks at how an application rates compared to all the other grants it is reviewing as well as applying the filter of the grant funding guidelines. Individual grant requests that are a good or even very good “fit” still may not be funded once filtered through the grant funding guidelines. For example, if the foundation only has $20,000 of funding left in a specific program area and 10 grant requests totally $200,000 have been submitted, the foundation will probably only be able to fund 1 or 2 of the grants, even though all the grant applications may be a very good fit based on the grant evaluation criteria.