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Rochester Area Foundation’s Community Choice Grant, bringing community together
ROCHESTER, Minn. – Rochester Area Foundation is launching its Community Choice Grant on Monday.
Celebrating 75 years of helping the community, the organization is awarding $1,500 grants to an area non-profit each month. Each month, five non-profit organizations will be nominated for their work in embodying the grant theme for the month. Here are the monthly themes:
January – Engaged
February – Innovative
March – Sustainable
April – Inclusive
May – Healthy
June – Fun
July – Livable
August – Collaborative
September – Learning
October – Creative
November – Grateful
December – Generous
Community members will then vote on which nonprofit will be the grant recipient each month.
The January nominees, with the term “engaged” in mind, are Bolder Options, Girl Scouts River Valleys, Miracle Field, Paws and Claws, and PossAbilities.
KIMT caught up with Bill Fay from PossAbilities, who says the grant money is helpful, but the grant program itself helps already. “Obviously we can use every penny that we get in and utilize it in some way to better our organization. But in the long term, the awareness something like this is going to raise is going to pay off even more,” he said. For Fay, the grant is less about the money and more about community.
“It kind of shows that area nonprofits, while they’re all separate organizations, they’re all working together to better the community,” he said.
Learn about each nominated non-profit and cast your vote, here. Polls for the January grant are open from January 14 at 9am to January 25 at 5pm.
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from the Post Bulletin on January 15, 2019
Who gets the grant money? You decide!
The Rochester Area Foundation is celebrating its 75th anniversary by handing out monthly grants to area nonprofits.
The organization is using some friendly competition to determine who gets a monthly $1,500 grant.
Each month, the foundation will select five nonprofit organizations to compete for the Community Choice grants. People are encouraged to vote for the organization they want to receive a grant online at the Rochester Area Foundation website. The lead vote-getter receives the full $1,500 grant, while runners-up get at least $100.
“You’ll find there’s no wrong choice,” said Jennifer Woodford, president of the Rochester Area Foundation. “Any time you have something out of the ordinary and a little competition, that gets the juices flowing.”
Woodford said the Community Choice grants are a way people can feel more involved in helping the foundation help organizations that do good. The competition also brings more nonprofit organizations to be involved with the foundation’s 75th anniversary celebration, she added.
“We want people to participate and to know a little about the work other organizations do,” she said. “Rather than throwing ourselves a big party — which we will— we wanted to do something to involve more people in our anniversary.”
The foundation chose a theme for each month and picked five organizations to fit the month’s theme. She said most organizations fit into multiple categories so the foundation worked to fit organizations of comparable size into each month’s competition. Each theme is a value or area of contribution the foundation’s partner organizations bring to Rochester and the surrounding area, Woodford said.
This month’s theme is “engaged.” The five organizations elected are Bolder Options, Girl Scouts River Valleys, Miracle Field, Paws and Claws Humane Society and PossAbilities.
Voting opened Monday and continues until the 5 p.m. Jan. 25. Cast a ballot online at rochesterarea.org/75.
Although the foundation has identified the organizations that will compete for the grants, the foundation is withholding that information until days before the voting begins each month.