Please carefully read through our guidelines before submitting a grant application. If you are inexperienced at applying for grants, we also encourage you to review our Resources for Grant Writers before applying.
$10,001 to $40,000
The Venture Grant is designed to assist projects and programs in reaching clearly stated goals and objectives. It is also intended to help projects and programs become self-sustaining. Venture Grant applicants are expected to provide information based on objective assessments of their programs.
When applying for a Venture Grant, in addition to routine information like the organization’s name, primary contact person, website, and mailing address, the following types of information will be required:
- Organization’s history and purpose (1500 characters, approx. 250 words)
- Tax-exempt status
- List of organization’s current board members*
- Previous year’s financial statement*
- Project description**
- Project activities**
- Project beneficiaries**
- A description of your previous work with these beneficiaries**
- Whether project beneficiaries are members of disadvantaged or underserved groups
- Project income and expenses (itemized by category)
* May be submitted in Word or PDF format
** Limit of 1250 characters, approx. 200 words
Venture Grant applicants will also be asked to provide:
- Past performance outcomes (change) as opposed to past performance outputs (activities)
- Evidence or research supporting project goals and objectives
- A description of the project’s proposed performance measurement, including a timeline of when the performance measurement analysis will take place during the funding year
- A list of organization or project partners or collaborators. If none are presently in place, provide a proposal for how partners or collaborators will be added during the funding year.
About Budgets and Financial Statements
Budgets and financial statements are not an afterthought. Funding organizations like Versacare Foundation look at your financials as a window into your project planning, strategy, feasibility, and organization sustainability, and for these reasons review of your application may begin with your financial disclosures and not the merits of your project. Also, Versacare Foundation may review your financial statements to assess your financial health and to make inferences about your leadership and past decision making.
With the exception of the financial statements, which are file uploads, most of the information you provide in support of your request is typed into text boxes within the online application. Each text box allows for a set number of characters, including spaces. We recommend composing your responses ahead of time in Microsoft Word or another word processor that will allow you to check your character count as you go.