GrantStation Insider: September 19, 2024

Application deadline: January 31, 2025
Geographic scope: United States, Canada, and Mexico
Grant amount: Up to $100,000, as well as technical assistance and evaluation support
Description: Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Asphalt Art Initiative provides support for arts-driven street redesigns that improve safety, revitalize public spaces, and engage local communities. The Initiative’s current funding round will award ten grants of up to $100,000 each, as well as provide on-call technical assistance and impact evaluation support, to cities in Canada, Mexico, and the United States with populations of 50,000 or more. The focus is on large-scale projects that will make important streets safer and more accessible, create significant new public spaces, or enact other similarly transformative roadway redesigns. Applicants must include a lead city agency which is the primary government agency with oversight of the project. Applicant teams are encouraged to include collaborative partners, such as other city agencies, nonprofit community or arts organizations, or individual artists or consultants.

Application deadline: October 14, 2024, and March 3 and August 4, 2025, for funding inquiry forms (Loans and technical assistance applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.)
Grant amount: Grants will range up to $250,000 for implementation and up to $100,000 for early-stage planning, predevelopment, and technical assistance. Loans may range from $500,000 to $5,000,000.
Description: The America’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) Food Access and Retail Expansion Fund (FARE Fund) will support innovative fresh food retail and food system enterprises that seek to improve access to healthy food in underserved areas of the United States through food retail. $60 million in loans, grants, and technical assistance will be provided over five years for the predevelopment, planning, and implementation of projects aiming to increase food access, and strengthen, expand, and innovate within the food retail supply chain. Support will be provided for projects in eligible underserved geographic areas. Grants and loans are designed to be one-time investments of capital into a food retail or food enterprise project in order to address higher costs and initial barriers to entry in underserved rural and urban areas. Eligible applicants include for-profit business enterprises, cooperatively owned businesses, nonprofits, institutions of higher education, state and local governments and governmental agencies and authorities, and tribal governments and tribal governmental agencies and authorities. (State, local, and tribal governments are not eligible for loans.) 

Application deadline: November 15, 2024
Geographic scope: United States, including U.S. territories
Grant amount: Up to $10,000
Description: The American Association of University Women (AAUW) works to advance gender equity through research, education, and advocacy. AAUW’s Community Action Grants provide funding to AAUW branches, AAUW state organizations, and community-based nonprofits for programs that promote education and equity for women and girls across the United States. General operating support is provided to nonprofit organizations whose primary mission focus is promoting education and equity for women and girls in grades K-12, with preference given to organizations promoting gender equity in STEM fields. Project support is available to nonprofit organizations, universities, and AAUW branches and state organizations for projects that promote education and equity for women and girls in grades K-12, with an emphasis on projects with a STEM focus.

Application deadline: May 1 and November 1, annually
Geographic scope: 50 U.S. states, District of Columbia, Native American reservations and tribal lands, and Puerto Rico
Grant amount: Average grants range from $2,500 to $20,000.
Description: The Comer Family Foundation provides support for syringe services and community-based harm reduction programs in the United States that improve the health and wellness of people who use drugs. Supported organizations provide free sterile syringes, safer smoking and snorting kits, education, and community wraparound services to reduce opioid overdose and the transmission of HIV and viral hepatitis. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, tribal governments, and organizations that require a fiscal sponsor are eligible to apply. Organizations must have total organizational budgets of less than $600,000, be grounded in harm reduction principles and practice, and provide access to sterile syringes and safer smoking and snorting kits through syringe services and community-based harm reduction programs that have been in operation for one full year. Grants are made either for general operating funds, including harm reduction supplies, or harm reduction supplies only.

Application deadline: None
Geographic scope: Rhode Island
Grant amount: Grant awards start at $10,000.
Description: The Rhode Island Foundation is dedicated to improving the lives of Rhode Islanders. The Foundation’s Responsive Grants are awarded to respond to the expressed needs of the community. Support is provided to nonprofit organizations across the nonprofit sector, regardless of the subject matter or area of need they focus on, that are addressing urgent community needs or an emerging opportunity, testing new ideas, or supporting proven programs. The Foundation also offers a number of other grant programs, including Strategic Initiative Grants, which support organizations and programs that align with the Foundation’s strategic priorities of economic security, educational success, and healthy lives.

Application deadline: October 15, 2024
Geographic scope: IL, IN, IA, MI, MN, ND, OH, SD, and WI
Grant amount: Up to $67,000
Description: Cultural Sustainability: Equity-Based Operating Grants, a pilot program offered by Arts Midwest in partnership with the Wallace Foundation, support small arts and culture organizations that are rooted in communities of color in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and the Native nations that share this geography.  Arts Midwest will award $55,000 general operating grants to nine organizations (one per state) with operating expenses up to $249,999 and $67,000 general operating grants to nine organizations (one per state) with operating expenses between $250,000 and $499,999. Eligible applicants include nonprofit organizations and fiscally sponsored organizations founded by, led by, or serving a community of color, as well as federally recognized tribes or tribal communities. 

Application deadline: Applications are reviewed on a quarterly basis. The upcoming deadlines are September 30 and December 31, 2024.
Geographic scope: Texas
Grant amount: Up to $2,000
Description: The Superior HealthPlan Provider Grants Program supports participating Superior providers and community organizations in Texas that serve individuals receiving Medicaid. Funds must be used to meet non-medical drivers of health, also known as social determinants of health, for the community, including, but not limited to, food insecurity, economic stability, education, neighborhood and built environment, access to healthcare, and social and community context.

Application deadline: October 24, 2024, and January 23, 2025, for concept papers
Geographic scope: Colorado
Description: Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO) invests a portion of Colorado Lottery proceeds to help preserve and enhance the state’s parks, trails, wildlife, rivers, and open spaces. GOCO offers competitive grant programs for outdoor recreation, land conservation, and stewardship projects in Colorado. Programs currently open for application include the following: 1) Land Acquisition Grants; 2) Community Impact Grants, to develop and revitalize parks, trails, school yards, fairgrounds, environmental education facilities, and other outdoor projects that enhance a community’s quality of life and access to the outdoors; 3) Planning and Capacity Grants, which support planning, capacity, research, pathways to career building opportunities for underrepresented individuals, education, and storytelling projects; and 4) Stewardship Impact Grants, for collaborative stewardship work improving ecological and recreational amenities. (Additional programs may be available at other times during the year.)

Application deadline: October 28, 2024
Description: The Build to Scale program supports organizations that may be operating initiatives to unlock investment capital across a region or sector, operating programs to accelerate company growth, empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs, or otherwise enabling technology commercialization. The program aims to build public and private capacity for entrepreneurs and innovators to invent, improve, and bring to market new products and services in critical, emerging, and transformative sectors and industries; accelerate the growth of regional economies that are focused on industries of the future; empower communities to provide proof-of-concept and commercialization assistance to technology innovators and entrepreneurs; and equitably and inclusively increase access to capital for technology-enabled entrepreneurs.

Application deadline: November 14, 2024
Description: The Norman Y. Mineta Japanese American Confinement Education grant program seeks to educate the public about the historical importance of understanding Japanese American confinement in the United States during World War II so that present and future generations may learn from Japanese American confinement and the commitment of the United States to equal justice under the law. The program will provide financial assistance to Japanese American organizations for large impactful education projects.

Is your organization looking to foster social change but unsure of the best approach? If so, you may want to read “What’s Your Start Agenda?” Published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, this article makes the case that effective change efforts, whether activist movements or social enterprises, must focus beyond just the problem or symptom they want to eliminate. Utilizing a number of case studies, it proposes that organizations must identify what they want to stop, socialize receptivity for their solution or proof of concept to build adoption, and then organize their entities to be able to implement these solutions at scale.

Webinar date: September 23, 2024, 2:00 to 2:45 PM Eastern Time
Description: The budget section of your grant proposals can present some unique challenges. Project budgets must be accurate, complete, and transparent. This can be challenging when the proposed project involves different activities, personnel, or resources. Even small errors and omissions in your budget or budget narrative can undermine the credibility of the proposal and reduce the chances of funding. Beyond that, you must demonstrate you can truly achieve project goals while keeping costs reasonable. During this TargetED, Alice Ruhnke will show you how you can develop a project budget that makes sense: one that justifies all of your proposed costs and demonstrates you’ll be an effective steward of the grantmaker’s funds.

Webinar date: September 26, 2024, 2:00 to 3:30 PM Eastern Time
Description: How frequently does your organization analyze your grantseeking program strategy and data? While it may feel like you don’t have the time or resources to continually examine your grant success variables, doing so will save you time and lead to greater success in the long term. During this webinar, Courtney Moran of Elevate will help you understand the success variables you need to be aware of when looking at your grant program. By asking the right questions and utilizing a few helpful formulas, you can help your organization understand whether your grantseeking program is working and how to adapt your strategy for more successful outcomes in the future.

Webinar date: October 2, 2024, 2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern Time
Description: Finding the funds needed to fulfill your mission is a never-ending challenge for all nonprofits. Whether you’re part of an established nonprofit or you’re a one-person development office, GrantStation can work for you because it is designed to help nonprofit organizations of all sizes get funded. During this live demo and Q&A session, Jeremy Smith, Director of Communications Technology, and Kerry Glauser, Director of Research, will show you how you can use GrantStation to complete your grant research quickly and get high-quality results. You’ll see how you can find and vet funding opportunities in a quick, streamlined fashion, so you and your staff can focus on what's most important—serving your community.

Have you visited our homepage this week? Additional local, national, Canadian, and international funding opportunities are featured there weekly! Current opportunities include Jews of Color Initiative (U.S. national), the Frankenmuth Insurance Charitable Foundation (U.S. local: AL, GA, IL, IN, KY, ME, MI, NH, NC, OH, SC, TN, VT, VA, and WI), Jane Goodall Institute of Canada (Canada national), and JournalismAI (global).