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I am sending out this to update everyone on the status of the District-Wide Global Grant. Three weeks ago, I sent a letter to club and district leaders promoting a unique opportunity to access Rotary Foundation Funds via a Global Grant. This unique opportunity presented itself due to the world pandemic and the many needs associated with it both locally and around the world.
As People of Action the district leadership team allocated $50,000 of our District Designated Funds (Foundation DDF) towards this project. The exciting part is being able to match club and individual funds with our district funds and then being able to get the additional match from The Rotary Foundation (TRF).
No one could have anticipated the response we have had from across the district. Clubs and individual Rotarians rose up to meet the challenge at an amazing speed to take advantage of this opportunity to help their communities and get to bring in this kind of financial assistance.
We set May 12th as our deadline for applications. As of today, we are looking at over $80,000 from clubs and Rotarians and we are still climbing as we approach the May 12th deadline. Keep in mind we will not be accepting any applications for funding after 11:59 pm on Tuesday evening that do not fulfill all of the criteria of this grant. I would even look for a response from Tony to make sure he received it since he didn’t get a couple due to an error in email or something.
We will be working hard to figure out the best way to get most of our requests funded with the 3.5 match to the largest extent possible. We may be able to get some DDF from our sister district to the north to help match funds going to our State food banks. We will also discuss having to sacrifice our district grant program this coming year since we are putting so much money into the district via this Global Grant.
Once we run out of funding options for our district match, donations will still be able to be matched by the Rotary Foundation. These remaining donations will still get the 1.5 match which is still quite good. (In other words, a $1000 donation will still get a bump to $1500 but not $3500).
We knew when we started this project three short weeks ago that there were risks in setting such high goals in serving so many clubs and communities in one big effort. The rewards of the final product will be quite impressive when we put it all together and we can look forward to celebrating our success.
A Nashua Rotarian who was involved in the early discussions three weeks ago said “Today, I am proud to be a District 7870 Rotarian” due the efforts he saw as we were trying to put together this grant. This was also just after announcing that we had pursued and received a $25,000 Disaster Response Grant from the Rotary Foundation to support our State Food Banks in addition to this Global Grant effort. In the end, we could be approaching $275,000 that we are putting into our district related to fighting Covid-19.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Past Governor Tony Gilmore who has taken on the largest pieces of coordinating this effort. He is going to have an extremely busy week putting the massive amount of paperwork together to submit our grant to the Rotary Foundation.
As we approach the deadline on Tuesday, Tony can be reached for questions at: awgilmore@yahoo.com 603-746-3703
Yours in Rotary Service,
Steve Puderbaugh
District Governor 2020-2021
Rotary District 7870 (southern NH & VT)
Rotary District 7870 (southern NH & VT)