Planning Responsive Programs
You are the person most familiar with the requirements outlined in the RFP, and as you gain experience writing grants, you will become very familiar with what local foundations will and will not fund. You'll be able to use this knowledge to guide you as you help develop programs and new ideas for collaborations with other groups.
One of the family foundations in Maggie's town published guidelines for an environmental program. Its goal is to protect the environment and encourage better land-use planning. According to their guidelines, their grant-making interests include:
Regional land-protection efforts that:
Preserve quality farmland and forests
Protect ecological corridors and valuable environmental features
Enhance water quality
Enhance access to the natural environment by the public
Regional or statewide public policy or advocacy that:
Protects or improves the ecological health of natural areas
Results in the more sensible use of land through farmland preservation and more efficient and sustainable urban development
Land-use education projects of potential regional significance
To be responsive to these program guidelines, a project that proposes to protect land must work in a geographical area targeted by the foundation and must address the listed criteria.
If you have an idea for a project to preserve and restore inner-city homes, could you make a case for the ways in which such a program would preserve farmland and forests, protect ecological corridors and environmental features, enhance water quality, and enhance access by the public to the natural environment?
Maggie did: “I learned that most often farmland is lost because it's sold to developers for residential centers. Usually, these bedroom communities also create long commutes that use additional gasoline and contribute to air pollution and oil runoff into lakes and streams. So I proposed that an effort to improve an inner-city neighborhood would reduce the demand for semirural construction and, thus, if successful, save farmlands. It was a tough sell, but we eventually won the foundation over by doing our homework.”
Now let's look at a federal grant RFP. In this case, you could not “fit a square peg into a round hole.” You must follow all the criteria exactly in planning your program and ensuring that it provides each and every service described.
According to the guidelines, the purposes of the grant program are:
To increase the availability of voluntary programs, services, and activities that support early childhood development, increase parent effectiveness, and promote the learning readiness of young children so that young children enter school ready to learn
To support parents, child care providers, and caregivers who want to incorporate early learning activities into the daily lives of young children
To remove barriers to the provision of an accessible system of early childhood learning programs in communities throughout the United States
To increase the availability and affordability of professional development activities and compensation for caregivers and child-care providers
To facilitate the development of community-based systems of collaborative service-delivery models characterized by resource sharing, linkages between appropriate supports, and local planning for services
List each of the criteria on a large flip-chart sheet and post them in the room during your team's brainstorming session. Have members respond to ways in which the proposed project already answers these requirements. Then have the team suggest ways that they could strengthen the program to ensure that it meets all the criteria to the highest degree possible.
