Reflections from Grant Review: Fall 2024

This blog is estimated to take 3 minutes to read.

As we near the end of our team’s initial reading of grant applications, I wanted to share a few reflections of my own and things our team has learned through this year’s grant process.

As each member of the team read and discussed every application, we had the time to really think about the goals of the foundation and an opportunity to continue to talk about those goals going forward. We also saw a few key themes come out of the grant review:

COLLABORATION
We know that addressing systemic inequities means no one organization can do it alone. We really appreciated learning about the quality of partnerships that were happening. For us, quality not quantity has always been important. Many applicants talked specifically about how they collaborate with others. That insight was so helpful – we learned about new programs and organizations we had not heard of before! We aim to continue helping foster collaborations, especially in these uncertain times for many of the organizations we partner with.

EQUITY + ACCESSIBILITY
As a foundation, we recognize that equity and accessibility work is a life-long journey, one that we as an organization are also on. We have our own growth areas in this work and we appreciated organizations who transparently shared where they are making progress and where they would like to improve. That genuine honesty and vulnerability means a lot to us. We are working and thinking about how we continue to help support organizations’ growth in their equity and accessibility work.

LEADERSHIP GROWTH + CHANGE
We continued to see new leadership emerge in new executive directors and organizational leadership across the community. We noted a commitment to not only continue important missions but also think about different ways in which to do the work. As we are thinking about burnout prevention at all levels of an organization, we see an opportunity to foster that growth for new and emerging leaders.

OUR COMMITMENTS FOR THE FUTURE
While reading applications, we often found ourselves wanting to better understand an organization’s impact on their mission and to hear more about what successes they are having. We realized that our application asks about what organizations measure for success, but we do not clearly ask about what specific successes organizations have had over the past year. We will work to ensure that we pose that question more specifically in future applications and spend more time talking about successes during our yearly site visits with our grantees.

Right now, we are finalizing our recommendations and working with the board to finalize our 2025 grants. We will notify organizations before December 13th via email to the person who was listed as the primary contact. If you are an organization that would like feedback on your application or more insight into a grant decision, please feel free to contact us later in December or into next year. Being transparent is a core value of ours and we will spend time connecting with anyone who would like that feedback in early 2025.

Thank you all for the important work you are doing to make our community a more equitable place to live!