Starting+a+Grant+Committee+Using+a+Wiki

All Saints Grant Wiki

//**The page has been set back to private (people's contact info is on there). Let me know if anyone else needs to still see it.**//

//**BACKGROUND INFO**// My daughter's school requires that parents volunteer 20 hours of their time, or pay $200 extra tuition. Being a broke grad student, I would rather volunteer! I hadn't really done anything yet this year, so I asked the director how I could help the school. After talking with him, and trying to think about how to tie in this class - the grant committee was born. The school had one in name only, and nothing had been done with it. This has been a lot of work - most of the "applications" are online, and so you don't know what it will ask until you go to apply for it. We started a Target application, only to find out that we needed things like our 501(c)3 status, and technical terms that google had to decipher. We couldn't just ask for money and then apply it where it was needed - we had to come up with a detailed plan showing how the money would be spent (and in Target's case, how they would benefit from being involved). Every week we show up determined to do something, and end up tacking on other items in addition to the original. We are no longer the "grant" committee, now we are the "Outreach" committee, as most of the grants want our ideas to have an impact on our community as well as the school. We've lost a lot of people since we started meeting; at our first meeting there were 17 of us, and now we are down to three members...

In other news, having this committee has also allowed me to have impromptu professional development with the staff who have attended the meetings. If we want to have technology in the classroom, we need to know what is available and various uses for it. Some of the ideas we've brainstormed include: creating digital stories from interviews of WWII vets, using skype instead of relying only on letters to the soldiers the 2nd grade class has "adopted," and the one we are trying to work on now - creating podcasts based on grade-specific interviews.