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Idea 1: An Annual Offering of "Micro-Grants" to Members

What do you think about an annual program of "micro-grants" which our members can apply for to support their individual research/service/leadership goals?

We've tried in the past to get a chapter scholarship program started, but never got off the ground with that. I suspect that's partly because the amount we could offer just wouldn't go too far towards the costs of formal education tuition, and partly because it was a lot of work to design, distribute, and evaluate applications--at least too much work for the benefit from it. But I think we learned something wonderful from the way we did the Literacy Project last Spring that we can bring into play here. I am thinking we could offer small grants of perhaps $150—maybe fund 2 or 3 each year—which could be used for educational research, for professional development costs, for classroom projects, or for any other purpose that aligns with PDK goals.

I'd like these grants to be particularly easy to apply for—like with the Literacy Project, any of our members who have a project in mind could submit a couple of paragraphs about their planned use for the money, and then the membership would vote on which of the ideas to fund. We could ask recipients to provide a brief follow-up report on how the project worked out, and we can then chronicle these projects on our website. I think this is easily doable, and would promote some interesting projects! I'd like to incorporate this idea into next year's budget which we will begin to consider in February. Perhaps we could annually do the Literacy Project in the Spring, and a Micro-grant Project each Fall. If administered similar to the Literacy Project, this would require:

• the time of the Webmaster to create the nomination and ballot pages, and to prepare the project outcome reports for the website;
• the time of the Treasurer to write and send checks to the chosen recipients;
• the participation of the membership for proposing projects and voting on the proposals.

Please share your thoughts on this!

Gay

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