Community Grants
Each year the Madison Rotary
Foundation awards grants to Madison community tax-exempt
organizations. Application availability is announced in October
and are then due in early December. The Foundation's Community
Grants Committee reviews the applications and notifies agencies
of their decisions in March of the following year. To receive a
Community Grants Application please contact the Rotary Club of
Madison. (Please review the grant criteria below before
requesting an application.)
The Board receives many more requests than
the Foundation has the money to fund. Also, some of the requests are
judged to be inappropriate for the use of Foundation Funds. It is
also important to ensure that the Foundation funding is really making a
difference in the community and that it is strengthening the recipient,
rather than propping it up, only to become more dependent upon future
grants from the Foundation.
The Board has developed a set of analysis
sheets that are filled out by the Rotarians selected to visit the
requestor to review the need for the funds, the proposed use of the
funds, the appropriateness of the request to the mission of the
Foundation, etc. Copies of these reports are then provided to the full
Board for their review at their subsequent Board Meeting. During the
Board reviews, recommendations are made regarding the need for follow-up
visits to the recipient and the nature of the information that will be
sought during those visits.
The Board attaches a great deal of
significance to the need for the proposed services, the level of
coordination that the requesting organization exhibits with others in
the community in the same or allied fields of endeavor, the
organization's plans for developing sources of long-term funding support
other than that from the Foundation, the reasonableness of the budget
and schedules submitted, the manner in which the results of the project
will be measured, etc.
All Rotary Club of Madison members are
invited to volunteer for grant review and follow-up assignments in their
areas of expertise and interest. You need only to notify the Rotary
Club office or one of the Board Members of the Foundation of your
willingness to serve in this assignment. As you might expect, the Board
is careful to ensure that there is no conflict-of-interest in any such
review assignment.
In 2004, $211,100 was awarded to community
agencies including $25,800 designated as Lona Ehlers Community Grants.*
Background on funding of this program:
Contributions from our membership's annual fund drive plus 5% of the
market value of our general endowment fund and the Lona Ehlers Endowment
Fund as of December 31, will be distributed in grants for the next
funding cycle. Our Foundation expects to award over $200,000 in
community grants and Lona Ehlers grants in the coming year.
*Lona Ehlers, born in 1907, in New Glarus,
Wisconsin, was a Registered Nurse. Upon her death in 2000, she provided
a generous estate gift in honor of her husband, Spike Ehlers, who has
maintained 100% attendance at Rotary meetings since 1946. This gift
established the Lona M. Ehlers Fund of the Madison Rotary Foundation
which expands the Foundation's
community grants program of providing funding to needy community
organizations.
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