Grant Application

This writing sample is from a grant application I prepared for Feeding America West Michigan. The grant secured $100,000 for Gather2Grow and the hiring of an Agency Partnership Specialist. To maintain confidentiality, some details have been adjusted while preserving the overall structure and narrative quality. 

 

What does your organization do?*

Use this space to explain what your organization does. What is your organization's mission?  What core services do you provide to those who participate in your programs? (10,000 characters)

 

Feeding America West Michigan is a food bank that serves 40 of Michigan’s 83 counties. Its mission is to gather and distribute food to relieve hunger and increase food security in West Michigan and the Upper Peninsula.

 

The food bank is a clearinghouse for resources, research, and advocacy. It coordinates with other basic needs organizations to identify circumstances on the ground and informs policymakers of food security conditions. As a partner to the Feeding America national organization, it accesses cutting-edge data to identify communities at risk of hunger. This data supports evidence-based programs administered through the food bank’s 700+ agency partners, forming a cohesive hunger-relief infrastructure across West Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. The food bank’s high-level view of the charitable food system enables it to determine where the greatest need exists and allocate resources where they will have the largest possible impact.

 

The need for food assistance is evident in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula. According to the Feeding America national organization, 41,493 (9%) of the region’s residents, including 12,603 (16%) of its children, currently face hunger. According to the United Way’s most recent ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) study, 39% of households in the region cannot afford basic necessities. That percentage includes 17,352 households that live in poverty and 40,685 ALICE households, whose incomes do not support their basic costs of living despite exceeding the Federal Poverty Level. Members of the latter group often turn to the food bank’s programs when in need of food assistance, as government programs such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are not always an option. A single person earning minimum wage in Michigan is not eligible for SNAP; neither is a single mother of one earning $12 an hour. US costs of living — especially those related to the most essential human needs, such as those measured by the ALICE Essentials Index — have risen steadily since 1980 and skyrocketed since 2007; while wages have not kept pace. An increasing number of working people need food assistance programs to meet their basic needs.

 

The food bank’s programs effectively target families experiencing food insecurity: approximately 70% of the food bank’s clients live below the poverty line. In 2021, the food bank collaborated with Public Policy Associates (PPA) to conduct a study of clients’ experiences with food insecurity and their attitudes toward food bank programs. Respondents to the PPA study related some of the ways in which they needed to compromise on their own health and wellbeing to make ends meet. 63% of survey respondents indicated that, over the last year, they “bought the cheapest food available, even if [they] knew it wasn’t the healthiest option.” 55% had eaten food after its expiration date. 49% reported that at least one member of their household had unpaid medical bills. High percentages of respondents reported a need to choose between food and other essential expenses, including transportation (55%), utilities (51%), medicine or medical care (47%), and rent or mortgage (40%). The food bank’s programs serve as a stopgap for many residents in our service area, providing essential nutrition at no cost and eliminating the choice between food and other essential expenses that so many of our clients face. 

 

Community needs dictate the implementation of our Mobile Pantries, and the food bank’s programs are responsive to these needs. 90% of respondents to the PPA study indicated a desire to eat more fruits and vegetables and 91% said they do so when Mobile Pantries make such items available to them. 54% said all or most of the fresh fruits and vegetables they eat come from Mobile Pantries. Mobile Pantries play a crucial role in filling in the gaps that federal programs leave behind. 80% of respondents to the PPA study said their SNAP benefits usually last only two or three weeks out of the month. This has only intensified in the wake of COVID-19 as grocery prices remain high, while emergency SNAP allocations have expired and stricter work requirements have been implemented on SNAP recipients. 

 

One example of an individual who might seek assistance from the food bank is Laufey, a grandmother who, due to a recent surgery on her hands, needed to take time off from her three part-time jobs and struggled to keep food on the table for her grandchildren. Her family’s financial situation worsened after her partner lost his job; past drug convictions prevented her from applying for and receiving aid from SNAP. (Currently, Michiganders with two past drug convictions are ineligible for SNAP for life.) Fortunately, Laufey has been able to bridge this gap and fill her grocery bags at the food bank’s Mobile Pantries. “It’s a godsend,” she said.

 

When families are forced to sacrifice their food budget, it can have a serious impact on other aspects of their lives. Aloy, Kris, and Padmé, community school coordinators at Midgard elementary schools through the Nine Realm School Services Network, shared their stories of hosting Mobile Pantries, spending their days soothing empty stomachs with snacks, listening to kids’ concerns and connecting families in need to resources. “You can tell a student’s behavior is different if they miss breakfast in the morning,” Aloy said. “Sometimes it just takes us saying, ‘Do you want some fruit?’ and they feel better.” Padmé and Kris shared similar experiences. “A lot of the ones that would end up having to deal with the social worker or behavioral interventionist – a lot of the time, they were just looking for a snack,” Padmé said. “I’ve known families that have struggled with getting food. They’re working up to two to three jobs, but they have to pay rent, they have to pay daycare, they have to pay their bills and it’s hard. Maybe they have 20 or 30 dollars for food – and if they have five or six kids, is that enough for them?” But thanks to the food bank’s programs, Aloy said, families “can continue to keep paying other bills and saving up money for other things other than just food.” 

 

Mobile Pantries drive many long-term, positive outcomes in the communities they are deployed in. The consistent consumption of nutritious food can lessen the prevalence of nutrition-related ailments and improve a community’s health and wellbeing, thereby reducing healthcare costs for individuals, families, and entire communities. Additionally, the program’s provision of food at no cost enables guests to spend money on other essential expenses.

 

The expansion of the Mobile Pantry program would help clients like Ellie, a primary caregiver for a parent, who attended a 2023 Mobile Pantry in Miller County hosted by Dawn of the Wolf Senior Services. Ellie has been receiving food from Mobile Pantries for over a year since she started taking care of her elderly father in his home as he said having access to Mobile Food Pantries “helps as a food source instead of having to go out and buy it all the time without having the funds.” Ellie further explained how her family enjoys “the fresh vegetables they get from the Mobile Pantries” and how she was “especially excited for the bison meat” she got during her most recent visit at the time.

 

The food bank’s programs also build connections within the local community and set a positive example for the youth participating in them. “It’s just giving back to the people who helped raise me,” said  Atreus, a school staff member who recalls getting food from Mobile Pantries when he was a student at Midgard elementary. “The biggest thing is showing the kids that just because you come from this small community doesn’t mean you can’t make it big. It’s not always about being a doctor or lawyer but about giving back. I think it’s had a positive effect on the kids.” 

 

Gather2Grow serves neighbors like Claire and her three kids, who escaped the heat on a hot mid-July day by attending Modern Library’s morning story hour. Afterwards, her kids eagerly took lunches from the librarians, who provide them daily as part of the food bank’s new Gather2Grow program. “We love the library, so it’s a good space to pick the meals up,” Claire said. “With food so expensive, it’s nice. It’s quick and easy to stop by.” Lorelai, another mom who visits the library, concurred. “It’s the best of both worlds because you get exposure to the library and books, and also get food,” she expressed. “The books feed their brains and the food feeds their minds!”

 

Claire, Lorelai and their kids are among the many families who need a little extra help putting food on their kids’ plates this summer. For many parents like them, the sudden loss of school meals means a bigger grocery expense—on top of other costs summer brings, like childcare. Gather2Grow aims to fill this gap. It helps ensure no kids go without lunch in the summer, mitigates hunger’s negative impacts on children, and positions them to succeed academically.

 

By expanding Gather2Grow throughout the Northwestern Lower Peninsula, the food bank would help many more clients like Iden, a Stars Hollow Branch librarian and mother of a 2-year-old and 5-year-old. “I went through a divorce over COVID,” she said. “Now I’m a single-income family. I just applied for [SNAP] and WIC for the first time in my life.” Iden found it difficult to ask for help by applying for food assistance, even though she believes it is worthwhile. She said she loves that Gather2Grow is “just offered,” no questions asked. Participation rates in programs such as WIC and SNAP are often far below estimated rates of eligibility due to challenging applications, or finding it difficult to ask for help through the local HHS. The food bank’s programs bypass those challenges, providing direct service to clients in our service areas without any red tape. 

 

Description of Program*

If you are requesting support for a specific program or project (as opposed to a capital grant or general/unrestricted support), please provide a description of your program/project in the space provided.  

If your request is for capital or support toward your organization's general budget, please skip this question. 

10,000 characters

 

Half of this $100,000 grant would fund Gather2Grow. Through Gather2Grow, Feeding America West Michigan collaborates with local libraries during the summer to provide free, easily accessible, nutritious meals to children from infancy to age 18. The program is a preventative health intervention that provides meals to children at a time when other sources of food assistance, such as free or reduced lunch at school, are unavailable. Gather2Grow also promotes the development of reading habits, as the programs are hosted at libraries. The program also provides economic benefits to the community, easing the financial burden of meals during the summer months and allowing food recipients to re-allocate scarce resources for other needs. 

 

In 2020 and prior, the food bank worked with the state of Michigan to provide summer meals through the Meet Up and Eat Up program. This arrangement posed administrative restrictions and limited access to partners, so the food bank opted to run the program independently. Thus far, the decision produced positive results and has encouraged the food bank to follow a similar course in 2022. Without the restrictions imposed by the state, the food bank can collaborate with more branches and serve a wider array of children; meal options are now more flexible, and sites can adjust their distribution schedules as needed. This increased flexibility allows the food bank to build relationships based entirely on a shared interest in ensuring children’s access to food, rather than arrangements borne out of circumstance and necessity. 

 

The food bank regularly interviews its clients, conducting surveys and focus groups to better understand its programs’ impacts and revise them to meet community needs. In collaboration with local partners, the food bank assesses the need for and viability of its programs on a quarterly basis. Attendance data is contextualized by local partners, who share the impacts of employment changes, publicity, weather, and other factors. These figures can indicate a need to alter the program. Furthermore, data from these local food-assistance efforts are viewed in tandem with reported statistics from other agency partners and programs unaffiliated with the food bank, including the USDA and other national organizations. This analysis assists the food bank in developing a complete picture of the need in particular communities. 

The food bank sustains Gather2Grow, like all its programming, through ongoing fundraising, donor cultivation, and grant support. The food bank relies on funding partners throughout Michigan to stay operational and keep its programs running. The food bank is approaching large foundations, businesses, and major donors throughout its 40-county service area for contributions.

 

The other half of this grant would fund a new Northwest Agency Partnership Specialist salary and benefits in addition to expanding Gather2Grow, a summer lunch program that serves youth at local libraries. The food bank’s expansion of programming throughout the Northwestern Lower Peninsula will officially begin with the Northwest Agency Partnership Specialist’s arrival, as the food bank will be able to extend its outreach to new agencies in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula: Antrim, Benzie, Charlevoix, Emmet, Grand Traverse, Kalkaska, Lake, Leelanau, Manistee, Mason, Missaukee, Osceola, and Wexford Counties. 

 

The Northwest Agency Partnership Specialist is especially crucial at this point in time because the number of meals being distributed to neighbors facing hunger in the region is low in comparison to the need. The food bank has the resources to send more food, but requires more partnerships in the region to facilitate those distributions.

 

Over the past year, the food bank has been seeking partners for Mobile Pantries, fixed pantries, and Gather2Grow in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula to expand programming in response to growing demand, but currently lacks the staff to perform dedicated outreach to the region. With a high volume of clients in the region, bringing in an Agency Partnership Specialist is a necessary step toward building a more cohesive network of support and collaboration in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula.

Earlier in 2023, the food bank hired a dedicated Upper Peninsula Agency Partnership Specialist for similar reasons which has proven to work quite well. Since hiring a U.P. Agency Partnership Specialist, the food bank is far better able to attend community events in the U.P., communicate clearly – and in person – with its partner agencies in the U.P., and has developed new partnerships at an accelerated rate. Given the proven success of the strategy, it makes sense for the food bank to hire a dedicated Northwest Agency Partnership Specialist for the same reasons: to foster connections with Northwestern communities. 

 

Beyond fulfilling the responsibilities of an agency service specialist, the new staff member – funded through this grant – would also act as a liaison between the food bank and the communities of the Northwestern Lower Peninsula to enrich connection and collaboration between key parties, allowing the food bank to better combat food insecurity in the area. The Northwest Agency Partnership Specialist will address the food bank’s goal of interfacing with clients more directly, speaking to a qualitative and quantitative understanding of who we serve. In turn, they would identify other necessary community partnerships with the food bank that would promote a path to self-sufficiency determined by the clients themselves. The food bank seeks a candidate with a deep understanding of nutrition, poverty reduction, and the variety of cultures within West Michigan and the Upper Peninsula.

 

In order to shift toward a more sustainable model for charitable food agencies, community buy-in is key to ensure a smooth transition that effectively expands levels of service in the region. The Agency Partnership Specialist would be key in cultivating such community buy-in, developing close relationships with an array of partners to ensure our plans reflect the needs of the communities we serve. By coordinating a synchronized approach to charitable food in the region through its Community Impact team, the food bank can bring for-profit grocery stores, food producers, small church pantries, and other social services organizations together to address the systemic food needs within the Northwestern Lower Peninsula community. 

 

Although small organizations act as a first line of defense in many local communities, they often lack a coordinated approach – creating a sense of competition between external organizations or other nonprofit organizations – which is something the food bank hopes to mitigate in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula through the creation of an agency partner specialist. The Northwest Agency Partnership Specialist, along with the rest of the Community Impact team and the food bank as a whole, will work to help local organizations see each other as allies and partners with which they can collaborate since working together will nurture relationships the agency partner specialist creates and, more importantly, will allow the food bank and local organizations to better serve communities in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula.

Just last spring, the food bank created a new eight-member Community Impact team to steer the food bank’s long term strategy through initiatives that form partnerships with clients, agencies, and other community stakeholders. The food bank is the leading charitable food organization in West Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, and should be utilized to bring key stakeholders to the table in a non-contentious way. In order to do so, the food bank must prove to stakeholders that it has the best interests of their community in mind which is where the creation of a Northwest Agency Partnership Specialist comes in. Having an employee who lives in the region and is part of the community is immeasurably valuable in demonstrating the food bank’s commitment to the people who live there and willingness to listen to its partners.

 

Desired Impact*

Using everyday language (no jargon), please describe the impact you are trying to make for those you serve.  How will you measure this impact to gauge if your efforts are successful? 

5,000 characters 

 

According to MI School Data, 52% of students in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula qualify for free or reduced lunch at school. Consequently, those who rely on the school lunch program often lack an adequate substitute during the summer months. While the federal government operates the Meet Up and Eat Up summer lunch program in many areas throughout the state, there are still many areas in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula that lack adequate summer lunch programming. Often, these are rural areas where the local school district draws students from a broad region, so even functional programs like Meet Up and Eat Up cannot reach many children facing hunger because they lack adequate transportation. The local library system in the Northwestern Lower Peninsula, in contrast, was built to be accessible to children walking or biking from the neighborhoods where they live.

 

Gather2Grow fills in the gaps in service left by other summer lunch programs that aren’t as accessible. It also provides educational resources for participating children, as well as an extra incentive for neighborhood children to visit the library during the summer to check out books or participate in other library programs. Many local librarians have acknowledged the program’s impact on raising child attendance throughout the summer. As the program becomes more well known in the community in its second year, the food bank has found the attendance rate at sites has been increasing dramatically – sometimes even doubling.

 

By increasing children’s access to food, Gather2Grow drives a number of positive outcomes. Short-term benefits include immediate improvements in an individual’s health, mood, and performance at school. In the long term, improved nutrition can lessen the prevalence of chronic, nutrition-related ailments and, consequently, drive improvements in a community’s overall health and wellbeing. Widespread improvements in health would, in turn, reduce healthcare costs for individuals and families.

Dina, a Jackson resident who leads a local Girl Scout chapter, receives support from Gather2Grow. She regularly stops at her branch to grab books and lunches for her son. Dina also picks up meals for a neighbor whose children qualify for free or reduced lunches during the school year. This neighbor commonly cares for their nieces and nephews as well, so their household is often unable to travel to the library during lunchtime. The pre-packaged meals distributed through Library Lunches to Go enable Dina to not only acquire nutritious meals while her son is home during the summer months but also ease the burden on a neighbor.

 

The program’s consistency and the meals’ nutritional value have also helped Joyce, a mother who brings her two daughters to their local branch every Monday. “It’s kind of our plan to check out books and grab lunches. We appreciate it,” Joyce said. “It’s nice that they’re all packaged up and they’ve got a little bit of everything. [One of my daughters] has high fructose issues, so it’s great to see she can have the stuff that’s in there.”

 

Adjustments to the program are based on how a community’s needs change over time and how effectively existing efforts meet those needs. In sampling data from the USDA, Feeding America national organization, as well as other national research organizations, the food bank is able to develop a high-level view of trends in food insecurity and plan our distributions accordingly. 

Alongside national data, the food bank utilizes attendance details from individual distributions, statistics from local hunger-relief organizations, and client feedback collected from the food bank’s communication network. This network of information forms a robust view of both local and national trends in order to contextualize a community's needs and influence future iterations of the food banks’ programming.