Teacher Mini-Grants
Would be interested in hearing from any other foundations that do Teacher/Educator mini grants:
- How do you collect applications (GLM/SLM/Something else)?
- Do you pay the schools or teachers directly?
- What is the average award amount?
- What type of follow-up do you require?
Grateful for any information/suggestions you can provide.
Comments
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Hi @AmandaHicks. We are delving into teacher mini-grants this year, as well.
In the past, we have provided a few grants to schools using GLM. Typically, the teacher/educator completes the application. Upon award, we have the principal also sign off on the grant acceptance form (also through GLM), and payment is made to the school to manage the distribution for the project. We have a short online follow-up form that is also completed through GLM.
We are going to be offering mini grants of up to $750 to teachers this upcoming school year and will be simplifying the application and follow-up form. We would love to see samples of teacher mini-grant applications from those out there who are willing to share. Thank you!
Laurie Abildso
Vice President
Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia, Inc.
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Thank you @LaurieAbildso.
How do you manage the GLM accounts/logins for the teachers? Did you create accounts for them and make them contacts under the organization? Did you sync these grants with CSuite for payment?
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Yes, each teacher is a contact under the school organization with the principal as the primary org. contact. We do sync grants to CSuite for payment.
Laurie Abildso
Vice President
Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia, Inc.
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Do you create their accounts for them or merge them after you've determined which school they belong to? How many of these would you say you do a year?
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In the past they have created their own accounts, but we rarely had more than one teacher per school. We may need to rethink this for our next grant cycle where we are likely to receive multiple applications per school. Would love to hear how others have handled this. We've only had 5-6 school grants per year, but this upcoming cycle is the first time we plan to offer targeted teacher mini-grants.
Laurie Abildso
Vice President
Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia, Inc.
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Our Foundation has a grant process specifically for teachers. We award grants quarterly (coinciding with the school year). Teachers can apply for grants from $50-$600. The application is in GLM, along with evaluations and follow-ups. When a teacher grant is awarded, we pay the check to the school corporation. We have a brief post grant report we assign to grantees in GLM, which is due 30 days after the project end date. Last school year, our average grant was around $460.
We have 10-12 school districts in our county, and our teacher grants are evaluated by a committee of educators, one from each district. Here's a bit more information about our program: https://www.cfmdin.org/teachers#grant-opportunities-teachers
Program & Nonprofit Relations Manager
The Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County, Inc.
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@JoAnnaDarda How do you manage the user accounts in GLM? Do you have individual organization profiles for teacher who applies or do you merge them with the main org profile? Do you sync these grants with CSuite for payment?
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We do sync the grants to CSuite for payment. The teacher accounts in GLM can get kind of wonky, because of the volume of teachers and schools we have in our county, but our system mostly works well. Each teacher creates their own account in GLM, and we put together a guide that asks them to enter their organization (school district) information exactly as it is written in the guide. This guide is linked on our GLM login page. The school district is then the organization, and the teachers are just users within that organization. Then when we sync the grant to cSuite to pay, the school district is the grantee. If you want to track the grants at the school level in cSuite, you can link the specific school to the grant as a sponsored org.
This mostly works well, but teachers don't always follow those instructions, so usually once a quarter or so, I will look at the schools in GLM and merge any duplicates.
The only time this becomes a major issue is when a teacher moves from one school district to another. If a teacher edits their organization in GLM to reflect the new organization, instead of creating a new user record with their new school, this will then change the corresponding organization record in CSuite. This has only happened a couple of times, and I've always been able to fix the issue after the fact.
If you go this route, it's definitely best to just do a quarterly cleanup/merge of appropriate orgs in GLM before that quarter's applications are reviewed or paid.
Program & Nonprofit Relations Manager
The Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County, Inc.
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@JoAnnaDarda thanks for this great info! Would you be willing to share your teacher guide?
Thank you!
Laurie Abildso
Vice President
Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia, Inc.
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@LaurieAbildso Yes I have attached our teacher account creation guide. If they enter all of this information correctly when they set up their account, it should add them to the correct organization in GLM. The guide is a little clunky, but it work for now!
I've also added a screenshot of our GLM login screen where we ask new teacher applicants to click the instructions
Program & Nonprofit Relations Manager
The Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County, Inc.
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Thanks, @JoAnnaDarda! How do you handle duplicate EINs when multiple teachers from the same school district apply? Do you prompt applicants to get in touch with you or do you allow them to continue creating a new organization and then later merge them?
Laurie Abildso
Vice President
Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia, Inc.
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DonorsChoose is another non-profit where I have made a grant to and they fulfill projects by teachers for around $500-$1,000. You can set parameters on where you would like to fund, subject etc.
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@LaurieAbildso If the applicants follow our account creation guide, it should put them into the correct organization in GLM. If not, we just let them create a new organization and we merge them later.
Program & Nonprofit Relations Manager
The Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County, Inc.
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