Donors Choose!

Donorschoose.org connects teachers and donors so that children can learn, play safely, explore new interests, or just receive the equipment necessary to follow their dreams. And if you're an educator in LAUSD, your school will be receiving boxes of $15 gift cards to be issued to parents in the coming months. If you are an educator, SIGN UP at www.donorschoosela.org. Post a project and see what happens; 60% of the projects posted receive full funding. Tell the parents are your school about these ...

Government Grants - Deciphering the Request for Application

Government grants can be a huge source of funding for schools and school districts, but reading a 75-page Request for Application (RFA), let alone writing those winning grants, can be daunting. This blog post will help you to navigate the RFA to get you on your way to writing that winning proposal fast and easy. The most informative pages of this RFA will be the ones that discuss the overview of the grant. This will tell you who is eligible, the background of the program and the purpose of the ...

Program Planning

Is your program rock-solid? If you can answer the following questions with ease, then you might be right. Maybe you're just starting out on the road to program development. If that's the case, these questions can help to guide you and help to identify areas where you need to clarify your project. Program Description - Describe your program in 2-3 sentences Your Team - Who makes this program possible? Who needs to be around the planning table? Goals, Projected Impact - What are the key goals ...

How Government Grants are Scored

Most government grants go through a peer review process - meaning all grant applications are read by a panel of people who are in the same or similar field that the grant will be funding. During this process, readers will score submitted proposals based on a points scale and funding is determined by who received the highest score when all the scores are totaled together or when they are averaged together. When you were in school yourself, teachers may have used rubrics to score your papers on many ...

Writing the Mission Statement

Applying for grants as a school puts us in a different position that most nonprofits. The language for what we do isn't always well established, which leaves us to make it up for ourselves. But how do we create a mission statement that sounds professional and meaningful, like those of nonprofit organizations? Compare these two mission statements. The first is from Camp Wildcat, a nonprofit I worked with in college. The second is from the high school I work with. 1. Camp Wildcat is a student-run, ...

Writing the Grant Proposal

You can find the full components of a grant proposal pretty much anywhere on the web. Trust me, a quick Google search will yield approximately 20 million web pages. Most every web page suggests that you include the following: Cover letter: This letter should be similar to your LOI, but should be limited to a singles page, without exception. It should be on your school's letterhead and should be styled as a business letter. Include the overview of your organization (mission statement) and the purpose ...

Writing the Letter of Inquiry

The purpose of a letter of inquiry is to help you determine whether or not there is a grant available to apply for if your research online has been unyielding. For some grant makers, this is a requisite step in receiving their Request for Proposals. This step helps to weed out those organizations that may not be as serious about receiving the grant or whose programs may not fulfill the mission of the funding organization. Participating in the LOI process will save you time in that you don't ...