Joe Redondo's Individual Contribution Page

Spring 2009 Contributions

I am very glad to be a part of such a dynamic project, unfortunately this is my first semester with Aguaclara so I have not been able to make any direct contributions as of yet, but I am looking forward to applying my skills and experience in the non-profit community to my work on the Outreach team.

Spring 2008 Midterm Conrtibutions

As a new member to AguaClara the first few weeks were spent gaining an understanding of how AguaClara worked and what the Outreach team was charged with. With this newfound knowledge the Outreach team was split into two groups, Public Relations and Fundraising. Having some prior knowledge with grant writing and the like I opted to be part of the Fundraising sub-team. However, it should be noted that the two sub-groups tend to work very closely with one another, as their paths seem to cross. For example, if I were to find an organization that is seeking grants, but offer none specific to AguaClara (as is the case with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), I would refer that organization to PR in order to solicit some sort of press release for AguaClara in general.

The meeting minutes are a bit unclear as to these early weeks, but most of that time was spent updating the already existing list of possible grants on the wiki and adding finding which ones were viable to pursue. Narayana was instrumental in explaining what worked and what did not in terms of the grants pursued last semester; it was due to his explanation that I began to look for grants on my own, finding my first one through a newsletter forwarded to me by Scott. The grant that was determined to be the easiest to complete was the Tech Awards Grant (TAG). I delegated the task of completing the TAG to Trang, while requesting information about the general AguaClara budget from Monroe. I received an outdated version of the budget (this was Monroe's "Dream Budget" from the initial days of AguaClara), and after discussing it with Monroe, we concluded that it needed to be redrawn. In the mean time, the TAG proved more frustrating than originally intended as there were some drops in communication between Monroe, Trang, and myself. After receiving the "Inventor Profile" document from Monroe (which answered the questions from the TAG), we were able to attempt to submit the TAG for the first time, resulting in our realization that the answers were still too long. We are currently waiting on a revision of those answers for submission.

However, the "Inventor Profile" document proved to be very influential in the Outreach proceedings that followed. I edited the document, changing a bit of the language to add make it more appealing and sweeping it for general grammatical errors (these edits were approved by Monroe). After my edit, I was able to share that document with Brandon and the rest of the PR sub-team, as we now had a good summary of the program that summarized AguaClara in layman's terms (some of the information was too technical for a press release and some grant applications). The summary mostly came from the Environ Foundation Grant, which was submitted last semester. It was around this time that I was told of the desire for a Grant/Fundraising Shortlist (this list will be attached to the bottom of this document). The team leaders were also assigning organizations to look at for possible funding sources. I was given Unicef and UNHCR, both of these organizations proved to be dead ends in the short term, but I do want to recommend a further analysis of their distribution strategies (it seemed to me that the only was to get a grant from one of these organizations was to go through www.grants.gov). Micro financing also seemed to be a priority that week and it should be noted that Narayana made great headway into that. I looked at Kiva as a micro financing group, but after being explained how AguaClara wanted to use micro financing, I decided to throw it out as a possible financier due to its differing structure from more traditional micro financing organizations.

It was around the same time that the PR group was writing a news article about AguaClara that I edited as well. The sources of information for that article came largely from the summary compiled earlier as well as from a new NSF grant submitted by Monroe. I had been asked to form a template for grant submissions, as many grants carry their own instructions, this template was meant to be a set of loose guidelines that focused on the general rules of grant writing as well as how to shape language depending on what we are submitting the grant for and to whom (these guidelines will be attached at the bottom of this document). The NSF grant submitted by Monroe is the closest thing we have to a general guideline for scientifically oriented grant submissions. Returning to the budget issues discussed earlier, Monroe had asked me to send him what I was looking for the budget to contain. Narayana sent me a copy of the budget for the IAF grant submission, which I forwarded to Monroe. The NSF grant contained a very accurate budget that I believe can now be used as the budget for AguaClara, the IAF budget model should be disregarded as an accurate budget template.

After a short correspondence with Monroe concerning the tax-status of AguaClara, I was presented with the opportunity to write a grant on AguaClara's behalf in a different class. This grant, if submitted and awarded would provide funds for the construction of a new Pilot Plant. I completed this grant early this week (03/09/2009) and will gladly email it to anyone upon request (note: I will not be attaching this grant to the guidelines or the wiki until I have the Pilot Plant budget. The grant is still being revised, but as I said before, I have no problem sending to anyone who asks so that they can take a look at it.

Throughout the semester Brandon and I have been compiling a master list of contacts ranging from PR to Fundraising organizations (the spreadsheet to this will be included in Brandon's midterm report I believe). Many of these organizations have already been contacted and most if not all of the grant organizations are listed there as well. Many of the organizations on the Shortlist are listed there. The Shortlist was completed this week (03/11/2009) and is by no means a permanent list. I want to post it to the wiki so that future Fundraising teams can add on to it. Some of the organizations listed are not currently offering grants for AguaClara, but I do think that a letter of inquiry would prove beneficial in gaining contacts and learning of other organizations.

This half of the semester was largely spent data-gathering and I know that the next half should and will be spent in the submission process of the grants and other means of funds we have identified this semester. We must not fall behind on updating the information on the wiki, I know of at least two places where the wiki has outdated material that in turn confuse PR and Fundraising when writing articles or grant submissions. Fundraising is a waiting game, but I believe that we can act more dynamically in terms of actively pursuing funds in the second half of the semester due to the information we have gathered in the first.

Attachments:
Grant Writing Guidelines#anchor
Short List

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