Meyer Memorial opened their 2018 portfolio funding opportunities and is visiting communities around Oregon to educate and engage prospective grantees. Here is the schedule of the in-person info session and virtual sessions. While in Bend, our staff attended an information session that included a couple of dozen local non-profits. We’re sharing our cliff notes:

The annual funding portfolio is broken down into four focus areas:

  • Housing Opportunities, Healthy Environments, Building Community, and Equitable Education.

The process includes four steps:

  • Application (due April 18); Proposal Invitation (mid-June), Proposal Due (July), and Final Decision (November) with the payout on January 1, 2019.

All grant applications must address diversity, equity, and inclusion. Equity was reinforced many times in all conversations during the session. Grantees must identify how their project will provide fairness in their community based on race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, disability status, geography, age and other forms of bias and oppression.

After the group overview, smaller sessions were held simultaneously on each of the focus areas. Pinnacle’s staff member attended Housing Opportunities. Meyer anticipates awarding $3.9 million.

The Housing Opportunity fund has three main goals:

  1. Preserve and Increase affordable housing for those below 60% of Median Family Income
  2. Help provide stability for individuals (2017 average grant amount was $115,000)
  3. Build capacity to strengthen organizations’ skills (2017 average grant amount was $108,000)

Funding is organized under the following categories:

  1. Capital (fund new units or renovations)
  • Up to $300,000 over one to two years
  • Can be a private developer, government, or non-profit
  • Meyer can’t be the major source of funding
  1. Project (mainly focused on Goal 2)
  • Project grants will be $10,000 to $185,000 total over one to three years.
  • For collaboratives, they will consider up to $250,000 total over two to three years.
  1. Capacity
  • Capacity building grants will be $10,000 to $185,000 total over one to three years.
  • Grants for technical assistance and collaborative planning efforts are generally up to $35,000 (examples include technical assistance to hire a consultant to plan a project (like an architect!), hiring a coordinator to run a project)
  1. General Operating
  • Typically, pretty competitive.

Meyer Memorial has a great website with an abundance of information.