Resources

How many grant cycles do you have in one year? How is your foundation aligning grant cycles with reporting requirements?

Does anyone have experience with a family foundation that has invested in a private company?

Specifically, we are interested in learning more about organisations that might perform due diligence on recipient charities (global universe) to ensure they are legitimate, not financiers of terrorism, etc.

Have other community foundations successfully streamlined their Donor Advised Fund grant request process? While we use FIMS and Donor Central to process our grants, we still rely on a paper approval process that we’d like to refine or even eliminate.

The recent rollbacks of the Affordable Care Act’s outreach mechanisms would seem to create the opportunity, even necessity, for health- or inequality-focused funders to lean in to support interventions like health insurance signup processes, renewals, and insurance plan navigators. It’s not ideal to replace government services, but in a crisis moment could demonstrate how different system actors can leverage, compensate for, or innovate around shared goals, until the public part of the system is able to be repaired and move forward. I’m curious to know about any funders who are working on this.

A colleague is interested in soliciting bids for a grantmaking intermediary. Does anyone have sample RFPs for that specific purpose that they could share?

Our foundation is interested in hosting a listening tour to hear from the most underserved populations in our community. Have other foundations hosted similar events?

We are interested in hearing about any organizations that currently use 360 evaluations. We are asking how other organizations developed policies/procedures around this process and if you have documents to share.

We are looking at how to make the grant application process more efficient in our region. We know that a common application form across different funders is a start. We’re interested to learn from people who use a common form what the challenges are and to share the form if possible.

I’m working on planning a monthly informal event where grantees or applicants can come into the office, perhaps first thing in the morning for coffee, and ask questions. Not just questions about the Foundation and our work, but also general questions about writing good grant proposals, how to contact a foundation, etc. Does anyone currently do anything like this? Has it worked well? Do you have a particular way of publicizing it or extending invitations?