The holiday season is a time for giving — to your friends, family, and neighbors.
The Foundation for MetroWest is trying to do just that, by distributing our 2009 discretionary grants and
raising awareness about the needs of 95 homeless families living in a hotel in Waltham.
As the calendar year comes to a close we encourage you make a donation to our
Annual Appeal and show your support for our work.
Our best wishes for a healthy and happy holiday season!
2009 Grantees Announced & Distributed
The Foundation for MetroWest just approved its 2009 Grantees in three areas —
Family Support, Arts & Culture, and the Environment. On Monday, December 14th all of the grantees,
Foundation Trustees, and members of the distribution committee gathered at the DeCordova Museum
to celebrate the grants and receive their checks.
This year’s grant cycle was the most competitive yet, and the 22 grantees are impressive.
We’ll be featuring their work more over the coming year, but until then here is a brief description of the projects we funded:
This grant will support a performance of "The Nightingale" incorporating Chinese and Japanese
music with Western orchestration and will feature a Chinese folk dance troupe.
For more information visit: www.commonwealthballet.org.
"Framingham in the Civil War" will be the focus of a planning grant to help hire a part-time educator to
create curricula, exhibitions, walking tours, podcasts, publications, and more.
For more information visit: www.framinghamhistory.org.
This grant supports the Reagle Player’s "A Little Bit of Ireland" - one of the Reagle Players’ original revues for 2010.
For more information visit: www.reagleplayers.com.
This grant will help keep older people safe from abuse, neglect and financial exploitation, through large group trainings about elder abuse and neglect.
For more information visit: www.minutemansenior.org.
This grant will support the Legal Services Program which provides legal assistance,
advocacy, and attorney and resource referrals to victims of domestic violence.
For more information visit: www.thesecondstep.org.
This grant will fund trainings, presentations, and outreach materials to educate people about elder abuse and neglect.
For more information visit: www.springwell.com.
This grant will support the Community Based Prevention and Advocacy Program which educates communities
about domestic violence and identifies resources to help survivors.
For more information visit: www.reachma.org.
This grant will support a Framingham Educational Liaison to manage the educational needs of middle to high school-aged boys and girls,
designated as homeless by the state, who come to the Wayside campus for treatment for serious behavioral and emotional issues.
For more information visit: www.waysideyouth.org.
This grant will fund an Advocacy, Benefits & Legal Services (ABLS) staff person to provide services to individuals and families at risk for
homelessness at Advocates Community Counseling (ACC) Outpatient Clinic in Marlborough.
For more information visit: www.advocatesinc.org.
This grant will allow the organization to run and build the capacity of Furnishing Options, a new initiative providing
donated household goods, free of charge, to people in need.
For more information visit: www.employmentoptions.org.
This grant will allow the organization to continue to offer free mediations in local courts by recruiting, training, and supervising volunteer mediators.
For more information visit: www.framinghammediation.org.
This program will provide Framingham's Woodrow Wilson Elementary School families with a Community Resource Specialist
who can provide vital links to area employment, medical, housing, heating, nutrition and transportation programs.
For more information visit: www.jfsmw.org.
This grant will assist low-income families and individuals at risk of losing their housing and those who seek permanent housing.
For more information visit: www.mwoconnection.org.
This grant will help plan and launch COMPASS Community College Collaborative (CCCC) programming at
Mass Bay Community College in Framingham, serving homeless and at risk families.
For more information visit: www.parentingresource.org.
This grant will support the Breaking Barriers program that provides participants with community English classes;
English instruction with hands-on exercises, group discussion and speakers on topics relevant to immigrant mothers; and a tutoring program.
For more information visit: www.watchcdc.org.
This grant will support developing two educational tours that reflect the visible seasonal differences in the Garden in the Woods.
The tours will be in MP3 format, downloadable from our website, and available on site on pre-loaded players.
For more information visit: www.newenglandwild.org.
This Grant will allow the Project to hire a consultant to run the first year of their Stewardship and Outreach Program.
For more information visit: www.solf.org.
This grant will help the Land Trust improve the Shady Pond Conservation Area by improving existing trails and creating education kiosks around the area.
For more information visit: www.walthamlandtrust.org.
This grant will allow Drumlin Farm to conduct an ecological evaluation for a proposed all-person accessible trail that they would like to build.
For more information visit: www.massaudubon.org.
How are Grants Made? 5 questions with Meg Ramsey
Meg Ramsey is the chair of the Foundation for MetroWest’s Grant Distribution Committee.
Since the grant process can often be intimidating, she sat down to answer five questions about how this year’s cycle worked.
Our Distribution Committee makes all of the discretionary grant decisions. The 2009 committee has twelve members who have been invited to join
the committee after expressing interest in the grantmaking process. Each member needs to fit the following criteria: they live in
the Foundation's service area, care about the work that local nonprofits are doing, and can commit to spending the time needed to make
the process a success. We also try to make sure that the committee is representative of as many different towns in our service area as possible.
The grantmaking process begins after organizations send in their applications. Members of the Distribution Committee read applications,
go on site visits, write reports on those site visits for other members of the committee, and then spend a day meeting as a group to make
the difficult decisions on who gets funding and how much funding they will receive.
Often the mission of an organization and the passion that staff and volunteers feel for it can be difficult to capture in words.
Making site visits is a way to put a face to the application, and can be particularly important when the Foundation and the
Distribution Committee has no prior experience with an organization. This year we had the opportunity to make site visits to 13 different
grant applicants – significantly more than we have in the past. We hope to be able to meet with even more applicants next year.
There were a few very common mistakes that we saw during the application cycle that organizations need to look out for.
While none guaranteed that an organization would not get a grant, addressing them is always beneficial to the organization:
Messy Applications: Some grant applications came across as if the organization threw something together at the last minute -
either because they did not have the resources or because they assumed that they would receive a grant.
Organizations who spent time putting the application together and reviewing it to make sure that there were no errors,
that all of the requested information was included, and that the application conveyed the correct message, were far more likely
to be successful than those who did not.
Lack of Focus: Grant applications tell the story of an organization and the project that the grant will help to fund.
For project-based grants it is often easy to share that story and the grant’s impact. When the application is for general
operating support, it becomes much more difficult to tell a compelling story - though not impossible.
In general, most of the applications were well put together, and in the end we had far more worthy organizations than we had grant money to distribute.
To say yes to more worthy grant applicants. We always want to increase our grantmaking dollars, and hope donors and fundholders will consider
contributing to our resource pool. There are two things that we would love to build upon during next year’s grantmaking process.
First we would love to have more distribution committee members from the towns where many of the applications come from.
We would also like to be able to expand the number of site visits and carry out some of them outside of the application process so that
we can meet more organizations.
Help needed in MetroWest
This year the state of Massachusetts closed transitional shelters across the state to focus on a rapid re-housing of homeless families.
In this process, more than 1100 families who had lived in transitional shelter were placed in hotels. In Waltham, 95 of these are living with
no food service and minimal access to other services. They have 125 children, many of them who are not in school yet.
If you belong to a group interested in volunteering to serve a hot meal, want to organize a drive, or donate to one of the groups working to meet
the needs of these families, please contact Judy Salerno at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
or call (508) 647 – 2260.
Professional Advisor?
Does your client want to make a positive impact in the area? We can help you make it happen. Since 1995, we’ve been an invaluable resource for advisors like yourself as you help your clients achieve their philanthropic goals. It’s a way you can make a lasting impression with your clients and they can leave a lasting legacy for the community. Learn What the Foundation for MetroWest Can Do for You & Your Client >
