Grantwell’s first priority is the student experience. Ultimately, the goal is producing opportunities that help students grow and learn through their work in Grantwell. The right kind of project experience can shape a student’s entire career. Interaction with clients allows student teams to engage with professionals to come up with solutions for their organizations.
As Grantwell teams focus on providing clients with exceptional and professional work, they also create lasting relationships of trust. Many of the most valuable project experiences have been the result of repeat work for a client, or referrals to other clients based on previous work.
Grantwell projects are structured around the skills and abilities students take from program coursework. This gives students a chance to apply their classroom learning to a variety of real-world problems. Client presentations provide an opportunity for the team to show what they have worked on during the course of the project, and formally hand over the final product to the client.
Current Projects Fall 2017
Be A Philanthropist
The Be a Philanthropist project is founded on the principles described in the book Grassroots Philanthropy by Bill Somerville. Through the allocation of micro-grants, this project enables individuals to engage in philanthropic behavior that they would not be able to engage in otherwise. The structure of the project encourages immediate charitable action when a specific need has been identified in a community and/or organization.
An individual submits a short application and receives notice of approval within six weeks of their application. All grants will be approved within two weeks of the application deadline. The individual carries out the proposed project and reports the success of the project to the Grantwell team.
By the end of the project deadline, the Grantwell team will utilize a program evaluation to determine the success of the micro-grants.
Community Foundation of Utah
Noorda Foundation
The end goal of this project is recommend one to two nonprofit organizations to the Noorda Foundation that are focused on post-secondary transitional services for at-risk students. Our team will conduct research on the best practices in this field and identify organizations that are executing these practices effectively. The semester’s deliverables will include a report detailing the team’s findings on best practices. We will include a list of organizations that meet general criteria for use in the winter semester.
LDS Self-Reliance Services
Self-Reliance Services (SRS) would like to become more effective and influential in the education nonprofit industry but first needs to understand who the most impactful players are, what they do, and how they do it. SRS needs a comprehensive model to guide them in how to begin partnering with impactful education nonprofits and create a long-term strategy to continue departmental development.
The Project Mission is to identify the most impactful educational nonprofits in Church-focused areas of the world and create a long-term model of the functional and operational aspects of the industry.
Arise Shine
This project works with the Arise Shine Congregation in Southern India to help evaluate effective tools for increasing economic impact in Christian villages.