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!
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