Grants to High School Sports and/or Club Organizations
Good Afternoon,
Our foundation has been getting more and more requests from sports teams in our local area asking for grants. Some sports teams are associated with local high schools, others are independent traveling teams. Some are asking for help with purchasing equipment and others are just asking for general help with uniform expenses. Also, we've began to receive grant request from clubs located in the high schools such as FBLA, Culture Club, Key Club, etc. I was curious how other Community Foundations handled these types of grant requests? Do you have limits or certain criteria on what you will or will not support? Does the club or sport type, or number of students impacted make a difference? Any feedback on this topic would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you
Samantha
Comments
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Parents at the local high school (with a 75 year old history) formed a booster club called Friends of Gables High, which is a fiscal sponsorship fund of the Community Foundation. We help them when needed to set up campaigns in CommunitySuite to receive donations (tickets) for their fundraising events. I was able to create some custom styles so that the FOGH logo and colors are replicated a little bit from their website, but then CSuite had an upgrade and my creative work was lost. See
CSuite is pretty limited in what a campaign can do, but you can fiddle with it so that a ticket can be used to choose a premium gift, such as a commemorative t-shirt or signed jersey etc., which the booster parents would have to fulfill.
We also have an Eventbrite account and we share it with them. The revenues from it go directly to their fund. This way they can set up ticketed events without help from the foundation staff.
Sometimes the parents have been over-eager and set up GoFundMe pages or tried to collect via PayPal for things and we have to help them curtail it and undo or roll-back all those donations. Once you have a fiscal sponsorship fund, our understanding is that 100% of the donations must come in through the fund.
I hope this helps!
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