Selection Process

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

1. Qualification Step. This step is done by the foundation's Directors. Based on the Director's funding interests and research of potential organizations to fund, the Directors will make an assessment of whether or not the organization is something the foundation would have an interest in funding. If the Directors are interested in learning more about the organization and its programs, they will initiate the application process by inviting the organization to apply.
2. Letter Of Inquiry Step. In this step, the invited grant applicant logs onto 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 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 grant applicant is notified and asked to submit a full grant application. Having this LOI step helps save both you, the 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 the grant applications have been evaluated, the board, at its board meeting, reviews all the evaluated grant applications. The board looks at how an application rates compared to all the other grants it is reviewing at this meeting 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 enough funding left in a specific program area to fund one grant and five grant applications have been submitted in this program area, the foundation will not be able to fund them all even though all the grant applications may be a very good fit based on the grant evaluation criteria.