"building the capacity of public media and technology organizations"
Finding, writing, submitting, and winning a grant is not an easy task. It is time consuming, technical (not in the fun DASCorps sense), and complex. This section will try to break down some basics so you’ll know where to start and then go through the general steps towards receiving a grant.
Things are going much more smoothly around here since my last post/our last small group phone conversation. This is what is new:
-we got our Facilitation Guide printed and it's super pretty and is drawing a lot of attention!
WARNING! Federal grant applications are, by far, the most difficult and the most competitive type of proposal to write, even for veteran grant writers. They require more than 100 hours of work reading/understanding application requirements, researching and writing.
At least that was what we were going to entitle our volunteer alert. Thought better of it at second glance. The Director of Teaming for Technology and I attended the John Mayer concert on Tue. night at our area's big amphitheatre to work a concession/vendor stand as a fundraising project. There was quite a process to be invitied, to host a stand, get certified to sell alcohol, etc.
It is half way through our Summer Day Camp here in Tempe and we are super busy with kids here for 11 hours a day. I had to put my fundraising on hold for a bit. We were able to get 500 dollars, which I thought was my ceiling for my fundraising. It turned out to be more in the 700 dollar range. I got a new Computer Lab staff and he has being doing wonderfully with the kids.
We held our first yard sale and it went ok. I am not sure this is the way to raise money for our computer lab. I have to figure out something quicker or at the very least more efficient. I put in at least 10 hours of work for 70 dollars worth of profit. I am open to any other ideas that you all might have.
Hello to all! It has been a very long time since I have blogged! Things here in Tennessee are going fine, although busy! I spent the entire month of December and most of February making fudge to raise money for the STAR Center. The fudge seems to be a very popular item, as well as a great gift to give or to receive. We raised about $15,000 with 2 fudge sales (one for Christmas and one for Valentine's Day). With each fundraiser, we included the option to have the fudge delivered to a person's home or place of business, and I recruited volunteers to help with delivery. For anyone who is interested, here is the recipe:
Comment from Laura Hanley on March 9, 2007 - 1:40pm
Wow, what an awesome sounding recipe...I'll have to try it, for sure. Thanks for sharing! That's awesome that you were able to use fudge as a successful fundraiser for your org. How creative!
Initial Questions
So whats been going on at CTOC (community technology organizing consortium) since I started my Vista-ship back in November? Well, from November to the beginning of January I spent a lot of the time doing outreach for a Holiday event we held. That turned out to be a bit of a flop on attendance and I did feel like a bit of a failure to my organization but I got over it. I realized the causes of low attendannce were various...new event location, holiday season, etc. It was my first few weeks on the job so I wasn't too hard on myself. As soon as that was over we got a call from CTCNet to help with outreach for the Los Angeles institutes, as they were lacking in registration. So the week and a half long tasks of phone calls, e-mails, and e-vites began again. This turned out to be much much better. The CTCNet institute was quite interesting and informative. Unlike many of the CTCVista's I lack in being "tech savvy" so I never realized the capabilities of various software components and its ability to provide access to the disabled.
Comment from lauren bratslavsky on February 1, 2007 - 2:03pm
Hi Dana-
Here's some starting points about broadband. Hope it leads you in the right direction.
PBS program on Net Neutrality (you may already know about it) - http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/index.html You can watch the whole program or just the parts that interest you (look for the subheadings). There are also a lot of documents at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/documents.html
At the Media Reform conference, there were at least 2 panels that may be relevant - one on wireless internet networking and another on the digital divide. Look for the audio recordings on the conference site: http://www.freepress.net/conference/=full_schedule07
And if you're looking for academic research or even newspaper/magazine articles, check into seeing if your local library has access to research databases such as EBSCO, Academic Search Premiere, or Lexis Nexus, any sort of periodical or research database. If you're at the library website, it would be under research page or something like that. Or find a friend who is going to school and has access to those databases.
Comment from danielle martin on July 11, 2007 - 4:49pm
Hey Tony,
Sounds like you're surviving the summer well...but how are you surviving that AZ heat?
I'll be calling you soon!
-Danielle
Comment from Tony ORourke on July 12, 2007 - 3:30pm
Well on the 4th we hit 117. Is it sad to think of 105 as "not too bad"? I am going to be freezing when I go back home. We are just hitting monsoon season out here so the humidity increases from the 5-6% range into the 30-40 percent range which makes it very uncomfortable. I am not sure I could take another summer like this. I will be awaiting your call.