First round applications for the Catalyst and Impact Funds are due February 12th. As you gather your materials and start your application, you should be aware that we have added new documents and information on our website for our grantseekers.

Below is a partial list:
• 2010 Grantmaking Plan provides a general overview of our 2010 giving strategy. Review this document to understand the Stewardship Council’s 2010 grantmaking strategy.
• Requests for Proposals These documents spell out the objectives and priorities of each grant fund and provide a question-by-question outline of the application form. These are our Guidelines for each fund.
• Insights to applications These documents offer additional staff insight into the kinds of answers our reviewers will be looking for in each application question. Our staff has commented and added insights into all of our funds,and for all of our narrative questions.
• Application templates in Word The templates offer you a place to draft your answers and to save a copy of your application prior to submitting it to our online system. Each template has text limited answer boxes with the character limitations for each question built in, thus allowing applicants to create their answers within a Word document. Besides being able to save your answers to your computer more easily, the templates also allow you to conduct a spell and grammar check prior to cutting and pasting your responses into our online grant application system.
• Budget examples Look here for budget examples. We will be posting more over the next week.
• Past grant awards by year and fund and grantee profiles and location If you are curious about what we have funded in the past and to read about the programs our grantees run, this is the place to look them up.
• Best practices links We have posted a series of links to outside resources on a variety of topics. If you are looking for additional background material, you may find it here.
• Research and reference materials All of our maps, research documents and any other materials related to our grantmaking can be found here.
• 2010 Grant Workshop presentation This is a pdf of our 2010 Grant Workshop powerpoint. It includes information on our 2009 grantmaking, our 2010 objectives and priorities and a section we call “Unsolicited Grant Writing Advice” that highlights some of the most common issues and challenges our reviewers found in proposals submitted to the Stewardship Council.

If you have not visited our website recently, please take a look. We have a new Grantees Section that includes a Google map of all of our grant awards and we continue to add new information.