This past Monday, over 65 community leaders came together at Vashon High School in North St. Louis to get an update from the St. Louis Children’s Initiative planning team. For those of you who don’t know, the St. Louis Children’s Initiative submitted an application to the US Department of Education for a Promise Neighborhood Grant and placed 26 of 339 applications. While the application was not among the 21 awarded, the group continued to work and is now ready to produce a competitive application and obtain an implementation grant in the next round of funding.
At the meeting, the implementation team presented the program model and described the process for selecting partners to be included in the next federal Promise Neighborhoods application. The planning team gave a great presentation but left many funders in the room wondering about the role of funders in this project. Rod Jones and Vernice Hicks-Prophet, both of Grace Hill Settlement House, agreed to answer some questions from St. Louis area funders and their responses are below.
What Funders Want to Know
- We understand that $30 million in funding for a second round of Promise Neighborhoods grants will be available soon for planning and implementation grants and that the St. Louis Children’s Initiative plans to apply for some of this money. Is the government requiring local funders to match the money received if St. Louis gets this award? If so, do those matches need to be included in the initial application? Read the rest of this entry »
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Collective impact is defined by the authors of the SSIR article, John Kania and Mark Kramer, as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem.” In a recent 
