| Mini-Grant Program 1996 |
In the fall of 1995, California's State Collaborative Literacy Council which administers the State Literacy Resource Center (SLRC) Program in California queried its SLRC USERS Group (field advisory board) about what direction the Resource Center should take and what unmet needs of the literacy field should be addressed. The USERS Group unanimously agreed that one of their major concerns was a lack of opportunity in California for small, easily administered and easily written grants to fund special projects within existing literacy programs.
Based on the input of the 32 local staff and adult reamers from all over the state and all types of providers who make up the Group, the Council decided to develop a state-wide grant program to address the need identified by the USERS Group. The program was to be called the SLRC Mini-Grant Program.
A Request for Proposal was developed and announced state-wide. Proposals for projects which were collaborative pilot, demonstration or research projects in adult and/or family literacy were requested. Five specific project areas were targeted, each having been identified as part of the mission of SLRC as well as a recognized need in California. These areas included:
Any provider of adult and/or family literacy in California was eligible to apply. Projects were required to be collaborations with three or more active member partners. The appropriate SLRC Regional Resource Center had to be one of the three partners
Grant requests from $3,000.00 to $30,000.00 were accepted. Although initially $125,000.00 was set aside for funding these projects, the response was so positive that the Council decided to fund ten projects at nearly $140,000.00. It was anticipated and announced that two projects at or near $30,000.00 would be awarded with the balance of awards in the $3,000 to $15,000.00 range.
Over 100 agencies requested application packets and 52 actually completed the forms. Family literacy was the most popular of all the categories. The applications were reviewed by a team of nonpartisan readers which included a private consultant and former literacy teacher/administrator with much ESL experience, the Chair of the State Collaborative Literacy Council, and the Director of the State Literacy Resource Center. Applications were ranked on basis of the points indicated in the submission form. That form can be found as Attachment A. The team calculated their results and made recommendations to the Council. After discussion the Council accepted the recommendations of the review team.
Although the original announcement had indicated that only two awards would be given at the upper level of funding (at or near $30,000), twenty-five of the applications requested over $20,000 making this upper range the most competitive. Three awards were made in the $ 11,000 to $20,000 range and five awards of $10,000 or less were given. All ten grant recipients were notified of their awards in September and the programs began on October 1, 1995, and continued through September 30, 1996.
What follows is a short summary of each project funded by the SLRC Mini-Grant Program All were deemed successful in achieving their goals and all ten felt that the SLRC grant had made a difference in their programs. Most felt that their projects would never have been started if it had not been for the SLRC MiniGrant Program.