2010 Blackbaud Fund Grants Announced
Great news! This week, more than $35,000 worth of grants were distributed from The Blackbaud Fund. I get the easy job - telling the world about the grants. Our employees did all the hard work.
Instead of having grants from the fund be a corporate decision, we have a tradition of putting the decision into our employees' hands. We use the annual process to teach our people how to be grantmakers. Sure, this sounds really fun at the beginning (and it actually is), but over time, the people who get involved learn just how hard it is to determine which worthy cause should receive a piece of the funding pie.
Under watchful guidance from Ashley Cooper of the Coastal Community Foundation, where the fund is held, and Tina Fei, our employee team lead, our people learn how to read a grant application, pulling out the details that give a clear picture of what might be accomplished (and, conversely, what might not). They gather around the table to share their initial reactions and questions... then they head out to do site visits, seeing the organizations in action for themselves.
The site visits, hands down, are the key element of the program from our point of view. They pull people away from their desks, their email, their work and put them into the field with the kinds of organizations we work with every day, just in a different way. They put on their jeans and work boots to go out into muddy fields to watch therapeutic riding sessions with children with disabilities. They sit down with executive directors and talk about long-term sustainability. They travel to rural parts of our community and meet people who have never been to downtown Charleston even though its only 20 miles away.
They come back with perspective. With a renewed sense of what our colleagues in the nonprofit world are accomplishing, about the struggles they face and how the money we grant them will help. This year our team -- Andy, Chanel, Collins, Kelly, Monica, Patrick, Ryan, Ryen, Sarah, Shakeima and Tom -- finished their work by selecting the following recipients:
Please join me in congratulating the 2010 grant recipients and thanking our employee team for a job well done! We are pleased to make the grants. And we're also pleased about what our people learned in the process and how this experience will inform what they do every day.