Request to Determine Institutional & Funding Standards

[LPaulson1985]

Required Information

Description

Request to Determine Institutional & Funding Standards to Establish Guidelines to Help Grant Writers Seeking Funding & Grants on behalf of the ProgCode community and projects. Should Help Identify Appropriate Funders and Grants
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Problem

With everyone working and having a life, it is often difficult to pin down a meeting with multiple board members while accommodating scheduling windows with grant officers. This greatly restricts ProgCode's Grant Writers from effectively setting or accepting meetings with grant officers and organizations. It is currently a circular process.
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Benefit

We can be effective in getting money out of politics through our community projects, get more support for community members working on those projects with a clearly established process and guidelines to obtain funding. This should help equip, propel, and sustain project efforts. ...

Plan

Get Feedback from the Community on Institutional & Funding Standards/Criteria

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Decision Making

Consent to continue/implement ...

Optional Information

Reference link(s)

Where to go to find more information (e.g., brainstorm document, presentation, Toolkit, GitHub, Trello, website etc.). ...

[jpb5013]

Thanks for putting this together, @LPaulson1985!

I overall agree with the approach to avoid funding from any non mission-aligned organizations and avoiding funding from publicly traded companies.

The biggest thing I've been thinking about is the revolving door between for profit institution and non-profit foundation and where we draw the line. For example, the Gates Foundation received a significant amount of its funding from Microsoft via Bill Gates, so would we be open to receiving a grant from them?

As @stephenscapelliti mentioned last night, we started down this path in the past, so there may be some previous thinking worth leveraging. There was some discussion around this in Issue #81 and #227 includes a couple useful links (like this Funding Use Cases.

I think my overall perspective is to avoid overengineering things out of the gate and instead to make the guidelines flexible and adjustable as we learn. We may want to consider some overarching requirements though (e.g., refusal to give up community ownership) and I always think it's a good idea to include some opportunity for community input on potential donors (even if it's different than the standard change process).

[LPaulson1985]

I agree Joe. This draft was just meant to be a general, community-editable guideline for me, Justin, and anyone else fundraising/grant-seeking on behalf of ProgCode as well as staff working in the week. (Or, bob-willing, someone pops up and wants to hand ProgCode an air baloon full of money or something!!) The reference issues above 81 and 227 are EXTREMELY pertinent to this end. And I am wishing Rapi was here, so I could ask him more about where that landed and what he found in his experience grant-seeking/fundraising. He had some pretty amazing ideas in there regarding, educational membership services, etc. Thank you for linking these in, @jpb5013. The Funding Use Case as well! Very helpful. MAy be worth answering some of the undefined and revisiting to see where the community stands on these funding sources at this point.