Selecting good grants

Mark PetersenNews

How do you choose between good and great? We struggle every year in making challenging calls on good, better, and best.

This is the tenth year of Stronger Together’s collaborative major donor granting initiative. In comparison with other years, this year’s round has been one of the most competitive. By the deadline of May 31, a total of $2,915,200  was requested by 43 charities. Demand in the last two years is 43% over the typical volume of requests in 2017 and prior. In contrast, our clients have pledged just under $1m to innovation grants this year.

We wish we could advance all LOIs to the final application round. Unfortunately, we have to make decisions that narrow the field for consideration by our philanthropic partners. We will be developing a shortlist for the full application round that represents 125% of available funds. Charities will be advised by email a week from today.

Here are some of the things we look for when shortlisting LOIs:

  • Innovative project that pops out as being special or unusual
  • Sense of a unique opportunity for our involvement at a major level
  • Our involvement energizes change in the organization
  • Alignment to core values of clients

Our thanks goes to all who are developing innovative projects! While we aren’t able to align with them all, we trust these innovative ideas will attract the right kind of support from other generous Canadians.

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