And the winners are....

It is with great pleasure that I announce the two winners of our Strive To Thrive Lincoln grant, sponsored by the Learning by Giving Foundation are...

*drum roll*

Still Waters Equestrian Academy and Lincoln Police Charities! 

Still Waters Equestrian Academy was awarded $6,000 for the purchase of handicap-permitting horse saddles to enable children of all-needs access to their horse therapy center. You can learn more about their organization here!

Lincoln Police Charities was awarded $4,000, $2,000 for the purchase of bicycles for local youth and $2,000 for their Christmas "Adopt-a-Family" program. You can learn more about their organization here!

Congratulations to both organizations on your very deserving grants! We are excited to see how our grant helps impact the lives of Lincoln and Lancaster County youth. 

Final Evaluation Process.

After some emotionally-fueled site visits, we had the opportunity to present on each site. This provided some much-needed context for making our final decision. When it came time to begin our final evaluation process, we were able to quickly eliminate six of our applicants. We saw how a simple site visit launched an organization to the forefront of the applicant pool, and how some of our front-runners fell flat after not being able to give us much more being the application.

Our final ten, however, took a lot longer to work through. This is when you started to see the favoritism for these organizations come out for some people - you could see their passion in their eyes as they spoke, their words carrying more weight than ever before. After much discussion, we had to take it to a secret vote. From this, we found a large gap between our applicants and eliminated another five from discussion.

Ultimately, we repeated the same process and found two clear winners that had an overwhelming majority of votes from our class. It was indisputable - these were our two recipients. The only thing left was to determine the amount we awarded to each. According to our grant guidelines, we could divide our grant up to five ways - $2,000 being the minimum award. With this in mind, we split our grant $6000/$4000 due to the slightly higher vote for one in our final vote of the course.

Stay tuned for the next post announcing our winners!

Site Visits.

And just like that, we were left with 16 finalists!

Camp Kesem

Lincoln Police Charities

Boys and Girls Club of Lincoln/Lancaster County

Junior Achievement

Girl Scouts Spirit of Nebraska

Men with Dreams

Lighthouse

Community Crops

Friendship Home

Teammates

Mourning Hope

Still Waters Equestrian Academy

Heartland Big Brothers and Big Sisters

Child Advocacy Center

Cornhusker Council Boy Scouts

Lincoln Children Museum

Our groups had the pleasure of visiting two of the above nonprofit organizations during our site visits. During these visits, we had the opportunities to see the applicants come to life through tour facilities, conversing with the employees/volunteers, and hearing testimonies from those who have benefitted from the organization. It also gave us the opportunity to ask any questions that remained after comprehensively reading their application. 

Questions such as:

• Why did you join this organization, and why are you passionate about youth?
• Have you completed similar projects [to your proposed project] in the past? If so, what have you learned from these past experiences that will enhance this project?
• How does your physical facility support your mission?

At the end of the day, we evaluated each site visit on a scale from 1-5 (5 being "strongly agree") on the following criteria:

• After visiting the NPO, do you believe that the organization's mission statement aligns with our own?
• Is the physical facility effective in helping the organization achieve their mission statement? 
• Were the people you interviewed passionate and knowledgeable about the organization and its cause?
• Do you believe the amount requested is appropriate for the reach of the NPO's project?
• Overall, how willing would you be to give this organization a grant of any sum?
• How much grant money would you be willing to give this organization?

It was truly a remarkable experience that we will soon not forget. Check out some of the pictures from our visits below!

45.

45.

We received 45 applications! We rejoiced knowing our applicant pool was grand and diverse yet mourned the future process of notifying so many deserving organizations that they weren't selected for our award. It was going to be a long road ahead, but we were ready.

The process towards identifying our grant recipients started rather slowly. While everyone had filled out a Google Form giving us a numeric breakdown of the applicants, we still couldn't agree entirely on how to start the elimination process. After 45 minutes of constant debate, we decided on a method for our madness. We worked through our applicants, in order of highest to lowest with our scores, and started to compare them to our mission statement. If they had 0% of our class voting to keep them, they were highlighted red - 1-49% were highlighted yellow, and +50% were highlighted green. Through this, we found our top 16 organizations.

Upon narrowing it down, our Site Visits group took the information and set up our visits. In the next post, you'll get a backstage pass to some of our visits!

Structuring.

Divide and conquer - that's what Professor Messersmith decided was the best way for us to divvy up the numerous tasks that are associated with our grant-awarding process. Below you will find a description of each of our groups

Mission/Identity:

-Create our mission statement and establish/strengthen our Strive to Thrive identity

-Design and order our shirts

Application/Website/News Release:

-Develop the application questions

-Craft news release with the help of the marketing department

-Update our website with our mission statement and any new information/dates

Publicity:

-Create a publicity plan 

-Manage our social media accounts

-Create a flyer for distribution

Initial Evaluation:

-Create a rubric for application evaluation

-Facilitate the initial evaluation process

Site Visit Arrangements:

-Create a protocol for each site visit and a rubric in which to evaluate each visit

-Prepare a short presentation for the class on site visit conduct and expectations

-Schedule site visits with NPO's and work out logistical information

-Assign groups to site visits

Awards Ceremony:

-Work alongside the event planning team in CBA to handle all aspects of planning our ceremony

-Prepare a script/talking points for all those presenting

Semester Evaluation of Process/Planning for 2017:

-Put together a timeline for obtaining data, analyzing and compiling data, and writing the final report

-Work with Dr. Messersmith to make in-class updates on a regular basis

Applicant Communication:

-Handle all communication with applicants in the case of not selecting them, selecting them, and outreach about the banquet

-Facilitate grant recipient notification phone calls 

So there you have it! Our 40 students have been equally divided into these eight groups and conquering the tasks all semester long. 

Defining Ourselves

One of our first goals as a class was to clearly define who we were and what we were doing. After some general discussion, we were able to come up with both our mission statement and our objective statement. You'll find those below!

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Strive to Thrive Lincoln has been entrusted with $10,000 by the Learning by Giving Foundation to allocate grants to nonprofits in Lincoln/Lancaster County. We can award a minimum grant of $2,000 to multiple nonprofits, or up to a single maximum grant of $10,000. The Learning by Giving Foundation was founded by Doris Buffett and partners with colleges and universities around the United States to distribute grants to local nonprofits.

Mission: Strive to Thrive Lincoln provides UNL CBA students with an exceptional opportunity to directly impact the lives of children in Lincoln and Lancaster County by supporting local non-profits in their efforts to help the youth, and ultimately contribute to the future prosperity of our community.

Objective: Strive to Thrive Lincoln is a University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Business Administration management class learning how to lead people and projects. This hands on opportunity will allow our class to be philanthropic and work with nonprofits in Lincoln and Lancaster County.

Welcome to our blog!

Let me be the first to welcome you to Strive to Thrive Lincoln's blog! Here you can find information on our class, the students that comprise it, the work we are doing, and, ultimately, our end result.

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Until next time...