Cortes Island's 2021 Grants in Aid

Roy L Hales/ CKTZ News - For the second year in a row, the SRD Board approved the grant-in-aid allocations recommended by Cortes Island’s non-profit sector.

“In the last ten years, I have received grant-in-aid applications on my own, adjudicated them as I saw fit and then made those recommendations to the Board. As I am phasing out of politics and really wanting to empower social profits here on the island, last year we experimented with democratizing the selection process. All of the social profits organizations were invited to participate,” explained Regional Director Noba Anderson.

It was a lot of work and “a little too transparent.” (Everyone could see how everybody else was voting, or not voting.)

This year’s process was more streamlined.

“I invited organizations to specifically apply for organizational development funds, not core funding or special projects,” explained Anderson.

More than $56,000 worth of applications came in, but Cortes Island’s Grant-in-Aid allocation is only $25,000.

This meant that, “If you are going to fund some projects really well, everybody is not going to receive funding.”

As they evaluated the applications, the selection committee asked questions like:

“What’s the history of the organizations success in these kinds of projects?”
“Are they generally prone to collaboration”
“Is this an exciting initiative?”
“What kind of leverage opportunities does it bring?”
“Could it seed self sufficiency into the future?”
“Have they received a lot of grant-in-aid funding in the past? If so maybe give it to somebody else.”
Three of the top four recipients in last year’s selection process – The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI), Cortes Island Women’s Centre and Linnaea Farm – were not recommended this year. The fourth, Cortes Community Economic Development Association (CCEDA), will receive $1,500.

The Klahoose First Nation will receive what is possibly the largest grant-in-aid ever awarded to a Cortes Island organization.

“They have only received a grant-in-aid once, I believe – perhaps twice, and their application just really caught the attention of the selection committee. It was essentially to hire a grant writer, to take advantage of so many funding opportunities available to the nation – but they haven’t had the capacity within their individual departments to go after them. That was a real leverage application,” explained Anderson.

She added, “From there, we just about fully funded the requests from Folk University and Cortes Radio … Cortes Housing wants to do a housing survey … to help decide how it can expand its work beyond the Rainbow Ridge project. CCHA and the museum … are the organizations that know how to write grants and made a great proposal. CCEDA received just a fraction of what it asked for. They had three or four different projects and we funded one of those.”