Grant Proposal

Dear Ms. Doyne,

On behalf of our class, I would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to work with you as our client for the Penns for Pennsylvania grant proposal. The whole process was very useful and informative in understanding how to research, format the proposal, and learn the overall basics of the process.

For my proposal, I looked at a local founder in Wilkes-Barre called the John J. and Marjorie M. Passan Foundation. In 2011, they had a total giving of $590,500 and I believe that your organization has a great chance of possibility receiving a start-up grant from them. An initial request of $15,000 is asked and appears to be reasonable based on the foundations past donations. The money will go toward resources such as computers, printers, textbooks, background checks, and writing utensils, which are the most essential pieces at this moment.

Through your own experience and strong volunteers, the organization has a great chance to become successful and sustainable. There is a great potential to form partnerships with both the elementary schools and the colleges of Misericordia, Wilkes, and King’s. Many of the local elementary schools are going through difficult times and this can provide them with the resources needed to form a well-rounded student.

Thank you again for this opportunity to work with you and I hope I provided some useful information that will assist you in the near future. I believe this project has great potential and that many students would enjoy participating is something such as this. 

Sincerely,

Nicholas Jallat

                                                                                                                      Executive Summary

Penns for Pennsylvania is requesting a reasonable $15,000 grant for start-up costs in the Wyoming Valley Area to assist with classrooms of around 40 young students in grades 3 through 8. This is needed to provide any starting resources, such as computers, printers, and textbooks. Along with this, there is a request that this money goes toward any initial business costs, such as covering the cost of any background checks that are required to work with children. At first, we will not have any salaries offered for any positions, including the head coordinator position that Shannon Doyne will be filling.

Our organization aims to serve low-income students from the Wyoming Valley area in cities such as Wilkes-Barre, Kingston, and other surrounding neighborhoods. The arts are something severely lacking in this area, and we hope to provide the necessary resources to help students in this field. According to ProPublica, 58% of students in the Wilkes-Barre area receive free or reduced price lunch, which is 24% higher than the state’s average of 34%. This is an extremely high number and many families are unable to provide after-school opportunities for their children. Arts programs are becoming a second thought for many elementary schools and they are rapidly being cut all together. Wilkes-Barre is a community that is striving for a rejuvenation of the arts and our organization can greatly help achieve that goal.

Our organization will assist in making sure the arts aren’t forgotten all together because they play a key role in developing a well-rounded student. While we cannot guarantee that our organization will improve students’ grades, it is reasonable to expect that this is a possibility. Volunteers will meet with their small group of three to five students each week for a six to eight week period to help develop creative writing skills such as story structure, different types of genres, and basic editing and proofreading skills. Each class will contain about ten to fifteen students and we believe this number will increase over time. The types of writing will vary from short fiction, poetry, specialized topics, and songwriting.

Volunteers with experience in writing and teaching will come from the neighboring colleges, which we hope to form a strong partnership with. These volunteers include college students and teachers. We will offer six classes over a six week period with around eight to ten students in each class. Based upon the interest and success of these classes, we hope to expand in the near future, offering more classes and requiring more volunteers. 

The head coordinator, Shannon Doyne, has strong experience with volunteer work and has a wide knowledge of the field to carry out the requested proposal. Ms. Doyne was the Project Manager for the successful non-profit Learning Works and The Magnolia Project in Wilkes-Barre. For both of these, she worked with stakeholders and researched new grant opportunities in the area. She also managed the staff and handled most of the communication aspects of the projects. Both of these projects are still going strong with Learning Works forming a strong partnership with King’s College.  

Statement of Needs

The organization will be located in the Wilkes-Barre area, and will assist students from kindergarten to eighth grade. Students from Luzerne County are able to access services any time after school. Possible locations will vary due to finding the best possible location that creates easy access for many students. Schools in the Wyoming Valley area are in desperate need of an arts program because many art classes are being cut, and they are a crucial part of every student’s learning experience.

According to ProPublica, 58% of students in the Wilkes-Barre area receive free or reduced price lunch, which is 24% higher than the state’s average. Also, according to the United States Census Bureau, the medium income in Wilkes-Barre is around $32,000, which is almost $20,000 less than the state’s average, and 11% of the population lives below the poverty line. There is a clear relationship between the median income and the state of the Wilkes-Barre elementary schools. In the neighboring areas of Dallas and Moutaintop, the schools are not suffering nearly as bad. The neighboring Crestwood district in Mountaintop has an average of 19% of students receiving free or reduced price lunch, according to ProPublica. Looking further at this, 85% of students at Daniel Flood Elementary come from low-income families with many other schools having over 50% of students from low-come families, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Our organization will allow students of various economic conditions to use our services because we realize the difficulties faced when trying to promote the arts in many of these schools. The Wilkes-Barre area is home to one of the largest growing Hispanic populations in the state with 16% of the student body being Hispanic. Our organization will cater to the need of students that may not have English as their first language and will not discriminate against any student.   

Each year arts are becoming less important throughout the United States, and in Wilkes-Barre it is the same thing. Arts programs will be cut usually before anything else and we believe that this will have a negative effect on a student’s learning experience. “Arts education enables those children from a financially challenged background to have a more level playing field with children who have had those enrichment experiences,'' says Eric Cooper, president and founder of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education. We hope to offer every student the opportunity to gain this useful skill, and we are always open to help.

Organizations such as the Center of the Village and tutoring services provided by King’s College already exist, but we believe we offer something more unique. These current organizations are very effective in what they provide, and we hope to eventually be able to form partnerships with them. Our goal is to use a mobile headquarters that will be able to go to various elementary schools, libraries and other locations as a place for students to go after school. Not only will this get students more involved in the arts and writing, but also it will give students a safe place to practice their writing. We want to form a strong and diverse community that has an appreciation for the arts and creative writing. We will offer volunteers that act as mentors for the students, and they will help guide each student with every visit.

There is great potential for a very involved volunteer community. King’s College and Wilkes University are strong places to start to let people learn about our organization. Also, we hope to allow retired teachers enter into our organization. A strong community partnership can be made with these colleges by recruiting a high number of volunteers.

Project Description

Objectives

Funding will allow Penns for Pennsylvania to easily set up a center for students to learn and write at for long time into the future. Not much is needed to achieve the organization’s goals and the results will prove to be extremely effective.

Goal 1: Penns for Pennsylvania will assist students in the Wyoming Valley area improve their creative writing skills, and through various workshops they will gain a better knowledge of grammar and public speaking skills.

            Objectives:

• Five starting classes with around ten to fifteen students for each class with workshops about the technical aspects of writing, different genres of literature, and public speaking basics.
• One class a week for a six to eight week period and can change based upon class sizes and student interest.
• 70% of students will complete the class after the six weeks is over.
• Initial focus on assisting low-income families in the area and making sure that they are aware of the services we have to offer. 
• Classes will vary in size, but most likely have an average size of ten students.

Goal 2: To create a supportive environment for participants to express thoughts and emotions in an atmosphere of mutual respect and encouragement.

            Objectives:

• To provide training and experience in responding constructively and respectfully to the writing of others in both annotated comments and in face-to-face interactions.
• To collect qualitative data from participants about the role of writing the program plays in their lives.
• Help students get involved in more non-school reading.

Methods

A variety of possible locations in the Wyoming Valley area will be offered to students grades 3 through 8. The organization will consist of volunteers from different age groups with experience in writing and teaching. It will be an after-school program that works closely with the neighboring schools such as Flood Elementary and Dodson Elementary School. Penns for Pennsylvania will hand out pamphlets to these schools and if possible, will have the coordinator or some of the volunteers go to the school as guest speakers. By doing this, faculty, students, and parents can learn about our organization and discover how easy it will be to access. Also, we plan on running ads in the local newspapers such as the Citizens’ Voice and Times Leader to further our publicity. We want to form a strong partnership with who we set up our headquarters at to further our possibilities.

Starting in the spring of 2014, we will offer both in-school sessions and after-school workshops. The goal of the in-school sessions is to have volunteers meet with students in small groups each week to develop creative writing skills and help students create a main writing project. The goal of the main writing project is that it will be published by the time the sessions end. The after-school workshops will be more in-depth and will be led by a volunteer teacher and volunteers in locations such as schools, public libraries, or community centers. General topics will include poetry or short-story writing, while more writing topics such as detective stories, children’s books, historical fiction, comics, and songwriting will be offered. The students’ main writing project will be published when it is completed and put in a book for all to see their accomplishment.

Project Timeline 

• Work with the local schools, libraries, or businesses to set up a location for classes and offices, and to invest in the proper resources needed for our organization to be successful. (2 months)
• Arrange the classrooms and hire volunteers that are interested in participating. Our coordinator, Shannon Doyne, will train the volunteers with the how she wants the classes and workshops to be run. (Less than 1 month)
• Open classes for students as an after-school program with the projected six classes offered in various cycles. (Continuous throughout the year)

Staffing

All volunteers recruited will undergo the PA State Police Background Check and ChildLine Child Abuse Clearances prior to working with children.

Staffing will consist of unpaid volunteers and the head coordinator Shannon Doyne. Shannon Doyne has extensive experience through working at Learning Works and the Magnolia Project in Wilkes-Barre. At first, she will be responsible with most of the organization and fundraising aspect of the organization, and she will be unpaid.

Volunteers are expected to come from the nearby colleges of King’s, Wilkes, and Misericordia and also anybody involved in the education fields, such as current or retired teachers. We expect to have one volunteer run the fundraising aspect of the organization that has extensive financial knowledge. Experienced teachers and writers would be beneficial for leading the whole class, and then helping volunteers and students when the small groups are made. Experience can come from teaching, being students in creative writing classes, or working for writing workshops.

Volunteers are responsible for:

• Communicating effectively to make sure their small groups understand the material and writing processes.
• Being able to manage working with a large class, small group, or an individual student.
• Interaction with students must be friendly and welcoming to any questions or concerns a student may have.
• Arriving on time each week for classes and acting in a respectable manner at all times.
• Assisting with the publishing of their students’ completed work.

Evaluation

To examine the effectiveness of our organization we will send bi-weekly emails to our donors to keep them updated with our progress. We will keep track of the number of students for each class and how many manage to stay through the whole process. For the last class a survey will be handed out to each age group to determine their personal opinions and feedback on the classes. A volunteer handbook will be written up by Shannon Doyne to discover the best possible practices to teach small groups about writing. The handbook is open to change as the classes go on and if some practices work better than others.

Sustainability

Penns for Pennsylvania will have a strong long-term future due to Shannon Doyne’s strong experience with non-profit organizations and the potential this organization has. With help from your initial start-up grant, we will be able to cover most of the beginning costs that are our main concern at this moment. Little is needed for our organization to sustain; just a high interest from students that we believe is very likely. We will achieve a majority of our funding from successful fundraisers, which will happen at different points throughout each year.

Conclusion

With your assistance, we hope to be able to have a successful start-up with all the necessary assets covered. The arts and creative writing is something we want to jump start into the community’s young students and it is a very achievable goal. Our community is struggling to keep the arts alive and our organization provides that opportunity to be more involved with it. Through Shannon Doyne and strong volunteer, we plan to be effective and long lasting to keep children in the classrooms and let them be excited about writing.

Thank you for considering our grant proposal and allowing the possibility for working together in the near future.