Drum Roll Please! Announcing MRG's 2019 Fall Cycle Grantees!

After an exciting grantmaking season that has required our eight volunteer grantmakers to collectively invest…

700+ hours reading and scoring applications;
25.5 hours talking to groups at site visits;
100+ hours traveling to meetings and visits; and
More than 36 hours to passionate and sometimes difficult discussions

… the MRG Grantmaking Committee is delighted to announce the 2019 Fall Cycle grantees.

But first, some data

Because of our two-year hiatus, we received an unusually high number of grant proposals — 76 to be exact. Requests ranged in amounts from $3,000 to $15,000 (the maximum amount allowed) and totaled $993,396. Half of the groups were first-time applicants to MRG.

An initial review (we call it Paper Screening) yielded 17 finalist groups, which received site visits from our grantmakers via phone or in-person. Even at this point, the requested amount still exceeded our grantmaking budget of $187,500 by $56,700.

Of the 17 finalists, the four groups that were new-ish to MRG were invited to attend Presentation Day on Sunday, November 17; ultimately, our grantmakers selected 16 groups to be funded. With the exception of two, they are all receiving a smaller amount than requested.

Traditionally, MRG’s goals have been to fund:

At least 15% LGBTQ+ led organization
At least 15% new groups to MRG
At least 45% People of Color led groups
At least 50% female/gender-non-conforming led groups
At least 35% outside of Portland, Salem, and Eugene

And we met almost all of them! Among our 16 grantees:

31% are led by LGBTQ+ folks
19% are new to MRG funding
69% are POC led
94% are led by women/femmes and/or gender-non-conforming folks
20% are outside of the Portland/Eugene/Salem (gotta work on this!)

In addition, 25% of the groups funded are immigrant led, 19% are youth-led, and 19% are led by low-income folks.

We must do better, though

While we are proud of those numbers, we also know that we must do better on a couple of fronts.

We didn’t receive many proposals from certain parts of Oregon (namely, the Gorge and Central Oregon), from disabled-led groups, Trans*-led groups, or Native-American-led groups.
Grassroots and emerging groups are competing for funding with larger, more resourced organizations.

We see it as our responsibility to remedy these issues, so we’ll be announcing some changes soon that you won’t want to miss! Follow us on social media or sign up to receive our newsletter here.