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Kelly,

Sorry this response is so late, but hopefully this helps. To get scholarship payments out for students who were attending for-profit training facilities, we partnered with a local non-profit that works with individuals in the career training space. In my case in Michigan, it was MichiganWorks and a local chapter near my community foundation. The community foundation handles the application, selection of scholarship recipients, and initial payment. I reach out to my contact when I have student that I've flagged and we send the payment to MichiganWorks and they work directly with the student since they have more flexibility in this space.

We have had a lot of success with this so that we can support the student who is attending linemen school at a university and linemen school at a for-profit company. We've also been able to use this partnership to help students in their next career training move - for example, maybe they needs tools or equipment. MichiganWorks has been able to facilitate that process on our behalf. Apprenticeships has been trickier, I've really only had luck in the tools/equipment space in these cases.

I hope this helps! Feel free to reach out if you have questions.

-Megan

Great question Tracy! We do both, and it depends on the fund and grantmaking process. With our competitive field-of-interest funds, we are doing our best to encourage grant panels to consider the impact of larger $ amounts to fewer organizations as opposed to wanting/trying to fund every applicant for less dollars (it is hard to decline so many worthy, impactful orgs!) Now, with our non-competitive grants which largely come from our county-affiliate funds, they tend to do smaller grants in large part because of their fund sizes, though a lot of our affiliate advisory boards are aware of and looking into potentially moving away from more grants/less dollars to fewer grants/more dollars.