This weekend, on Sunday, Nov. 15, an organization that I’m involved with, the United Way Stone Soup Philanthropy Corps, is hosting a meeting of landmark importance for the fledgling organization. Although the club has been functioning for nearly two years, we are finally following through with the third point of our mission statement.
You see, Stone Soup is a grant allocations group organized very similarly to the United Way of Tompkins County. Our purpose is to raise money from a number of different funding sources, accept applications from local non-profit organizations requesting this money in order to support projects to benefit the community, and then award these funds as a grant to the non-profit.
Last year, Stone Soup’s first real year off the ground, we raised over $3,000, a sum culled from the Ithaca College United Way faculty campaign, event sponsorships like Ithacappella and Voicestream, and our big, now-annual fundraiser, February’s Family Carnival.
Stone Soup advocacy material from Feb. 2009's Family Carnival
Now, after having the “Request for Funds Proposal” posted on the United Way’s Web site for two or three weeks, we will finally bring to a conclusion the first official grant cycle of Stone Soup. Close to a dozen local groups applied, and after having mock allocations deliberations on Tuesday, I know that we have a tough decision ahead of us.
In order to prepare, we read this great article by Dr. Joel Orosz of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, who does exactly what we’re about to do: evaluate a variety of proposals and then take a bet on which organization he trusts most to effectively carry out their proposal. This weekend, inevitably, we’ll encounter some of the moral and logistical issues he faces when deciding which proposal is most deserving of our financial support.
Wish us luck!
Alyssa Figueroa
Adam Polaski
Alyssa
