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!