Arley

To me this week was all about questions. Some that come to mind are, when are we going to have the application ready by? How are we going to know it gets to the people/organizations we want it too? What size organization, budget wise, should we give too? How can we tell if they have made a lasting impact? How do we evaluate good leadership? Should we split up the money? Should we require that the organization we choose match our donation? Should we go on site visits and conduct interviews with all of our grant applicants? It was partially overwhelming, but at the same time important because it shows us what a complicated process this is.

To tackle all of these questions we continued working in our two groups to work on the hard task of developing a united philanthropic mission statement and description of our values. On Tuesday we finalized our respective groups mission statement, value statement, and funding focus, and we discussed them both as a whole group. Even though our groups had decided on very similar areas to give our money too there was still a large amount of disagreement on exactly how to word the mission statement. This discussion really exemplified how people can get really passionate about something that they put work into even if someone else only wants to change it by a small amount.

Our group had a list of potential areas of childhood development in which we would like the organization to work with, and the other group thought that it was confusing to have that list as part of the mission statement because organizations might think that they needed to incorporate all of them in their programs and end up not applying for our grant for that reason. A problem that our group had with the other groups mission statement and value statement was that it had “too much fluff”. That an organization looking at that values statement would not understand what the values meant because they were so vague and hard to qualitatively measure. At the end of class on Tuesday we choose four members of each group to have a “battle royale” on the two controversial mission statements on Thursday.

On Thursday we divided further into groups to discuss pieces of the RFP that we are going to put together as a “Frankenstein” mold for our final draft. The first group, the negotiators, worked on our final group mission statement. A second group focused on the specifics of the grant(s) we want to give and who will be eligible, etc. A third group looked at our selection criteria, and our application narrative, and a final group created a flyer to advertise our grant opportunity to potential organizations. I worked with the group creating the flyer, and we found it hard to make without knowing what the other groups were doing. The whole process seemed a little disjointed, but I guess it was necessary considering we couldn’t get all of those tasks done as one group, and this is only our first draft of the whole RFP.
Even though this weekend did provide a lot of new questions I think that it is beginning to become much clearer the direction in which we are headed and what exactly we are trying to accomplish. With our finalized mission statement and drafted RFP we will feel more and more confident about getting our application out there and hearing back from potential organizations. I look forward to this week and sending out a strong RFP we are proud of to the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region.