To find out if your organization would qualify for a Pacific Northwest Community grant, please carefully review the following information.
Areas We Fund
Find out more information about each of the following areas we fund:
What We Fund
Our Community Grants program supports projects that:
- Are in alignment with one or more of the Community Grants focus areas
- Are proposed by a 501(c)3 nonprofit, tribe, or government entity
- Serve residents of Washington state or the metro Portland area
- Include the priority populations of youth, families, Native Americans, and other communities of color. Within these populations, a majority of those who would benefit from the work should be low income.
- Show evidence of sufficient organizational capacity to successfully carry out the proposed work and achieve the proposed project outcomes—or include a viable plan for increasing capacity in order to complete the work
- Leverage partnerships with public or other private funders
What We Don’t Fund
- Event sponsorships, including fundraising, membership, and promotional events
- Health care, including primary care, disease prevention, intervention, health education, and outreach
- Individuals
- Civic projects, such as parks, fire and police departments, roads, and sewers
- Capital projects, including athletic facilities or requests for technology equipment only
- Fraternal or political organizations (including lobbying), as well as programs that include religious proselytizing
- Organizations that discriminate in policy or practice on the basis of age, race, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or religious belief
- Environmental causes
- Endowments, operating deficits, and emergency-funding needs
- Production of books, films, and video
- Scholarships for higher education (find out more about Gates Foundation scholarships, which are not funded through Pacific Northwest Community Grants)
Helpful Hints
Projects that include one or more of the following criteria are more likely to be funded.
- Projects that demonstrate the direct involvement in program design, implementation, and/or evaluation of multiple community stakeholders, including representatives of the populations that will benefit from the work
- Direct-service projects that have evidence of meaningful impact at the client level or, if a new approach, a logical theory to test
- Projects that will lead to change at an organizational or systemic level, such as strengthening an organization or improving a system
- Projects that have evidence of sustainability beyond the grant period
- Projects that show the strength and experience of the board of directors, executive leadership, and project staff
Your Letter of Intent (LOI) should demonstrate that you have performed adequate financial planning. In addition, consider the following information about how we fund our grants when writing your grant application.
- We consider multi-year funding when appropriate to the proposed work, typically for grant terms of up to three years.
- Typical total grant sizes are $50K-$200K. For smaller projects with smaller funding needs, we refer applicants to their local community foundations.
- Although we do not restrict our funding to a specific portion of project costs or operating budget, and do not have a specific requirement for matching funds, the majority of our grants cover 15 to 25 percent of project costs.
