Instructions for the final project:
1. Go to guidestar.org and browse around 990s and other information. Select a nonprofit that is of interest to you, in any field. The nonprofit should have total revenue and support of somewhere between $2,000,000 and $50,000,000.
2. Put yourself in the role of a program officer of a foundation. You have received a grant request from the organization above for a grant of $100,000. Your job is to evaluate the grant and make a recommendation to the class, which will be acting as the board of the foundation, as to whether the foundation should provide funding for the grant. Here's a made-upexample:
a. Say you select the Hoboken Food Bank, which has revenue of around $5,000,000.
b. You create a scenario in which Hoboken Food Bank is coming to you with a request for $100,000 to help expand its reach into the five poorest neighborhoods in town. It wants us (the foundation) to fund the salaries and related costs of two staff people whose job is to scout out possible branch locations in the neighborhoods and to solicit grocery stores and other possible providers of food donations.
c. Your job is to present to the board some background on the organization, the purpose of the grant, a budget for how the grant money is to be used, and a recommendation as to whether we the board should agree to fund the grant. Your recommendation may be either positive or negative; choosing one or the other is equally valid. You don't need to make any specific assumptions about what kind of foundation we are; we'll assume for all presentations that our foundation does in fact sometimes, but not always, fund the kind of projects and organizations your project involves.
3. To carry out this project requires you to create (make up) a plausible grant request. In the example above, there's a fit between the mission of the organization and the purpose for which the grant is requested. It would not be plausible if the made-up grant request were for a food bank that wants to start up a children's literacy program, worthy though that might be, because the food bank probably doesn't have the management infrastructure to expand its mission into a non-core area. In figuring out what's plausible, you might start with the organization's web site and/or do some other research into the kinds of programs the organization carries out.
4. You will need to develop and present a budget. We will be discussing program and grant budgets later in the term. In the meanwhile, find your organization and dream up ways it could use $100,000.
5. Finally, in making your recommendation to us as a board you will need to do some basic financial analysis of the organization. Using the 990 and other materials (perhaps a prior year or two of 990s), you should evaluate whether, for example, the organization already has plenty of money to carry out the proposed program and therefore doesn't need our support, or, alternatively, that the organization is on shaky financial ground and we shouldn't pour any money into a "black hole." The kinds of things that boards of foundations are interested in include, but are not limited to, trends in revenue and expenses, ratio of net assets to total assets, current ratio, fundraising costs, program expense ratio, and other financial measures that we'll be learning about in the next couple of weeks.
You will have five minutes, maximum, to deliver your presentation. You must bring with you your budget, on one page, and, if you want, one more page of material (for example, some graphs relating to your financial analysis, or some pictures from the organization's web pages, or anything else). You need to have one copy of each page for each student in the class, plus me. You may not use PowerPoint or any other computer or visual aid.