Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Grant Recipients CHOSEN!!!

We are SO excited to announce that we've officially selected two recipients for the ImpactNC 2018 grant!

Michael's Angels Girls Club

Mission: CIA: Converting Idleness to Action by providing Edgecombe County with a sustainable program focused on transforming individual idleness of 2nd to 12th grade females to a sisterhood united through using community service, educational support/enrichment and personal empowerment programs.

Project: To start offering GRASP Summer to MAGC members--GRASP (Grades Raised & Sustained Program) Summer will provide literacy tutoring for elementary members of MAGC who had low DORF (fluency, accuracy and retail) scores, and provide a mentoring opportunity and part-time summer employment for older MAGC members.

Grant Amount: $5,000

Kids Making It:

Mission: To reduce juvenile delinquency and empower youth to grow into responsible citizens through woodworking. The KMI vision is for all KMI youth to stay in school, graduate, and transition successfully into adulthood through college or the workforce.

Project: To ensure that all of the kids KMI serves stay in school, graduate, and go on to be successful adults, through higher education or entry into the workforce, thus helping to break generational cycles of dependence upon others for income and support.

Grant Amount: $5,000

Thank you to all who applied, and congratulations to the recipients! 

-The ImpactNC 2018 Class

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

ImpactNC Update!!

Our class is entering an exciting stage as we have officially passed the deadline for our RFP, have received all of our grant applications (17 applications!) and are now down to five finalists.  

We have begun more in depth research and are doing phone interviews with the organizations to gather as much information as possible about their proposed plans before making further decisions.

We have been very impressed by the organizations who have applied for a grant from us.  Our focus on educational initiatives was quite broad and some very creative approaches to education have made it into our final review.  We are very excited to continue this review process.

The process of narrowing down the 17 applications to five was extensive.  We read all of the applications, did initial ratings, presented on the top 10 organizations, and then further reviewed and voted.  

Our class has been rather surprisingly in agreement about the voting and decisions to move on in the review process.  We have had mainly unanimous votes so far, which is pretty rare from what we have heard from guest speakers on other foundation boards.  We are very pleased with the final five organizations and are excited to learn more about them and continue this process.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we continue towards a final decision!

Friday, March 23, 2018

Applications are in!!

We are all very excited to announce that the due date for applications has passed, and we will start reviewing them soon. We are looking forward to reading about the 17 phenomenal organizations that applied and going through the decision-making process. The Data Committee has successfully created an efficient and fair system that we will be using to evaluate them.

Some things that we have discussed in class and that we will make sure to keep in mind throughout this process include:
-Difficulties organizations face when applying for grants
-The importance of listening to the community’s needs
-The importance of partnerships between organizations
-Acknowledgement of inequity and justice across race, class, gender, etc., the importance of addressing larger systematic issues
-The fact that we have as much to learn as we do to give

We are excited to apply all that we have learned and discussed this semester and make a real impact in Eastern North Carolina. It is impossible to give without learning, and seeing what organizations are making a difference will be a very meaningful experience.

Friday, March 2, 2018

RFP and Application are Finally Posted!

We are very excited to announce that we have finalized our request for proposals and grant application, and they are now available on the CCPS website via:




We hope that our readers share this link with organizations that may be interested and that are operating sustainable educational initiatives in Eastern North Carolina.

Our first committee spotlight this week is on the Data Committee!

Tiffany Turner and Kelly McNeil worked very hard to put the application online and developed the review rubric with the writing committee. They are looking forward to compiling information and statistics on the grants we receive and working with the rest of the board to develop a decision-making process once the grants are in. It is important to the data committee and the entire board to create a method that is fair and unbiased for reviewing the grants. This committee will also create spreadsheets as needed to document our decisions about proposals.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Welcome to ImpactNC 2018!

Welcome to the ImpactNC 2018 class blog!  We are excited to have you all join us in our work to use philanthropy for social change.  


Our class of 16 people and our two fearless leaders, Becca Bender and Lynn Blanchard,
have already seen some lively debates this semester.  Representing all four years at UNC,
various hometowns across the country, and different interests reflected in our different majors,
our team is a group that is ready to use philanthropy to create social change.  

Our fearless leaders, Becca and Lynn!

This year our focus area is educational impact through literacy programs in Eastern North Carolina.  
After researching dropout rates and the achievement gap in schools in North Carolina, we decided to
focus on organizations in or serving Eastern North Carolina because this area seemed to be in the
most need.  


Education is such a personal issue to each of us that we are all passionate about, so it was difficult
to decide on things like whether we should focus on rural or urban schools or on literacy or mentoring
specifically. However, so far we have always been able to come to a consensus and many of our votes
have been unanimous.


After a couple weeks of researching, debating, and deciding on our issue, location, and qualifications,
we are finally sending out our Request for Proposals.

Through this blog, we hope to shed some light on what’s really going on behind-the-scenes at ImpactNC,
through committee spotlights and updates on our progress as a class.

Grant Recipients CHOSEN!!!

We are SO excited to announce that we've officially selected two recipients for the ImpactNC 2018 grant! Michael's Angels Girls Cl...