Community Impact Grants Overview

The Golden Civic Foundation’s Community Impact Grants fund measurable strategies to make a positive impact on the quality of life and create a better future for residents in our community. An organization can only apply once a year for only one (1) of the following Community Impact Grants:

1. Collaborative Grants

The Golden Civic Foundation is committed to our history of identifying, facilitating and nurturing collaboration. We encourage grant proposals that think collectively and act collaboratively in addressing a community need, improving community support, solving a problem, or enriching the people of Golden’s educational, health, or cultural experience. Collaborative Grant awards will range from $5,000 to $30,000 per award.

These grants are awarded to recipients for formal, collaborative efforts between two or more non-profits. Recipients are selected based on the strongest collective and collaborative approach to addressing a community need, improving community support, solving a problem, and enriching the educational, health or cultural experience of the people of Golden.

Each collaborating partner must be integral and accountable for the project. Examples of collaborative partnerships include shared resources, joint planning, and coordination of programs and services. Important to note is that one organization must serve as the applicant and be responsible for the implementation. Both organizations must bring funds and in-kind resources to the project and budget them. This could also be structured as a matching/challenge grant from both organizations. Organizations must show how the collaboration will be sustained and funded going forward. A memorandum of understanding between the organizations may be necessary in some cases.

2. Support Grants

One of the ways the Golden Civic Foundation helps to build a healthy and thriving community is through our Support Grants. This program seeks to identify community initiatives that advance solutions to our community’s greatest challenges using innovative strategies and a collaborative spirit. The Golden Civic Foundation encourages grant requests that are innovative, measurable, and sustainable. Grant requests in this program often exceed the funds that are available. Support grants will range between $500-$5,000.

3. Organizational Improvement Grants

In order to do great work, non-profits and municipalities need strong leaders, clear plans, efficient systems, and a sustainable revenue stream. This takes staff development and time to research and plan, something for which many non-profits can’t support. It’s also often hard for non-profits to make the case to donors to support this kind of work versus direct services or programming.

In response to this gap in resources needed to achieve this important fundamental strength, the Golden Civic Foundation has created Organizational Improvement Grants to help. We welcome applications that focus on an organization’s planning needs related directly to how they might achieve their mission through strategic planning, merger conversations, and similar efforts. Organizational Improvement Grants will be up to $7,500 per award.

These grants are meant to supplement other funding, as we understand that this amount is typically not enough to cover the full cost of providing these services but we feel that it is important that the recipient have some investment in this process. In the application, we expect the budget to reflect revenue indicating the additional funding necessary to complete the project. We welcome the use of these funds as challenge or matching grants to secure the additional funds.

Grant Application Process

• Applications: Applications open on January 19th and will be accepted until March 1st, 2024.

Timing is subject to change.

• Initial Review: In mid March, the GCF’s Board of Directors and Advisors will conduct interviews with organizations that submitted Community Impact Grant applications.
• Final Selection: A final review panel, comprised of Board Directors and GCF Staff, will determine the grant funding for the Community Impact Grant Program. Finalists will be contacted regarding their status and amount of grant in early May.
• Announcement and Payment: The GCF will formally announce the Community Grant Recipients at our Annual Grants event in mid May. Grant payments will also be distributed the same week.

Grant Making Criteria

In addition to the funding priorities listed on our Grants Overview page, each of these Community Impact Grants will be evaluated with the following criteria:

Additional Criteria

• Articulates a well-defined need with clearly defined actions to meet the need.
• Builds organizational capacity and leads the organization to become self-sufficient.
• Uses collaboration to leverage impact.
• Is feasible and likely to succeed.
• Proposes an accurate, appropriate and reasonable budget.
• Attracts additional funding and leverages resources.
• Clearly defines meaningful and measurable project outcomes and methods to report actual outcomes.
• Has a long-term impact, especially relative to cost.

Scoring Rubric

Below is a link to the scoring rubric that our Reviewers use to score applications.