My initial intention for this class was to find funding for our KidsKup program (the picture here is from last week's race; we have one more before the funding runs out), which BikeTexas is actively seeking now. I plan to keep looking for grants that can fund KidsKup.In the meantime, the grant that I mentioned briefly in class last week from the Aetna foundation sounds like a great fit for the kind of work BikeTexas does. Our education side has a five-hour curriculum for elementary students that has been presented to about 2 million Texas children over the last 10 years.
I started talking to a coworker last week about writing a potential proposal for the Aetna grant and making it as real-world as possible for something that BikeTexas could realistically do. We both started talking about afterschool clubs and bike rodeos, but that's not really the way that BikeTexas has conducted our education program.
To reach so many students, BikeTexas has trained 7000 Texas teachers over the last 10 years. We focus our efforts on training the trainers, so that we can multiply our efforts. A staff that has varied from 10-20 people at any one time couldn't have reached as many students if we tried to do all this ourselves. (We used the same approach in the pilot year of our university education program-- we held 5 webinars to train orientation organizers at 8 colleges, and reached about 3000 students in one year, with only 1 1/2 FTE staff working on the program.)
So, all the stuff that I talked about with my coworker the other day needs to be scrapped. It was fun and easy to get carried away with our ideas in a brainstorming session, but we have to frame those ideas inside what we can realistically do. We would have had to partner with schools and programs in the cities that the Aetna grant is for anyway (Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio), but the kind of partnership that BikeTexas specializes in means we may never set foot inside a school.
Working through the process of reading over the RFP and tailoring it to fit both Aetna's mission and BikeTexas's mission will be a great practice in honing on exactly what each organization needs. I'm looking forward to finding other grants to use for this class and seeing how each one is a bit different and will require a different approach. It may be that some potential funding sources won't match up well with the one-step-away tact to bicycle education that BikeTexas uses.
Nice job here, Su, gathering a lot of your critical reflection for the course at this time. I like to see solid thinking manifested in writing, as you've done here.
ReplyDeleteI find brainstorming on projects always useful. There are tidbits from every project that relate to other projects; the struggle is in moving forward to the writing stage with projects. In looking at the picture here, for instance, I kept thinking what about a grant to sponsor kids with helmets. There must be some families who can't afford good ones, or that's the straw that broke the camel's back, and so don't invest because of it. Or companies that make wearable cams for helmets...
Sounds like you're making progress, working through RFPs and tailoring. Nice job.
Su, like you, I don't think I will get to use the foundation I presented in class. Since AARP Foundation does not have anything posted now, I can't afford to wait and hope.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading through your thought process about the next step. Could you train trainers/organizers to put on bike rodeos and organize after school clubs?
I'm also struggling to get a really targeted RFP. I think we all may be trying a bit too hard here... maybe looking for a small part of the dollars associated with a large RFP who will make multiple awards could be a better strategy. It seems to me that the larger ones are often less-targeted... for example, it is a real struggle for me to find things relevant to Texas Tech University. Many things that look promising are earmarked for regions, and many more things specifically preclude the type of application I am able to put forward. I assume as we get better at searching, and more used to different funding sources, this will streamline out, but I get the frustration... however, if somebody wanted to fund our exact project, they already would have, right? Why bother with the whole grant framework?
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