Invitation for Funding Bay Area Student Power-Building Initiatives

About this Opportunity

 

• We will select five organizations with an annual budget greater than $150,000 but less than $5 million to each receive a $300,000 general operating support grant (spanning four years at $75,000 per year).
• We will select four very small organizations or collaboratives with an annual budget between $0 and $150,000 to each receive a $12,000 grant. These will be one-time, one-year grants.
• A small committee of nine people (primarily transitional-aged youth) from the San Francisco Bay Area will review applications and make final grant recommendations. 
• Learn more about Stupski’s Postsecondary Success work here and our interest in student power building below, if interested. 

 

Who Should Apply

 

Your organization or collaborative should apply if all of the below describe your work: 

• You serve San Francisco or Alameda Counties.
• You employ, are informed by, and are led by the communities you serve. Stupski will  prioritize funding for organizations led by Asian American, Black, Indigenous, Latino, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islanders, and/or other people of color and organizations that demonstrate a history of working with communities of color. 
• You offer paid employment or paid internship opportunities to students and other college-aged young people.
• You are a nonprofit or fiscally sponsored organization, policy/advocacy organization, collaborative, or institution that is working to build student political power through community engagement and/or organizing, leadership development, research, and/or advocacy.¹
  

 

The committee evaluating applications with Stupski will also use these additional criteria to prioritize finalists:

• Smaller (less than 10 staff, less than $1 million annual budget) and/or newer (founded in the last one to three years) organizations 
• Organizations that are student-led and where students are decision-makers 
• Organizations with an explicit focus (including in their mission statement or theory of liberation) on students whom oppressive political and educational systems do not serve
• Organizations that are paying or are working toward paying livable wages and for whom this grant will help them do that

The nine-member committee co-created the above criteria. The committee will review and evaluate grant applications based on the level of alignment. If there are more aligned organizations than are possible to fund, the committee will continue discussion until it reaches a consensus.  

 

Previously Funded Organizations: Similar organizations Stupski has previously funded include Power California, Youth Organize! California, Oakland Kids First, and Evolve CA. For a full list of our grantee partners, click here.

Note: If you are a very small organization or collaborative (annual budget of $0-$150,000) working on an idea/project to advance student power, you may apply for a $12,000 seed grant by clicking here.

 

How to Apply

 

To apply for a $300,000 general operating support grant, kindly submit this brief Google Forms-based application by 5 p.m. PT on May 17, 2023. We will respectfully remove from consideration applications submitted after the deadline or those that do not meet the above criteria. 

Stupski will notify final grant award recipients via email no later than end of the day June 30, 2023.

Resources

We strive to place accessibility at the core of this application process. Accordingly, we offer the following additional resources to potential applicants:

• This Google Doc, which also includes tips and helpful thought-starters, will help you plan your application response. 
• If you are an organization with an annual budget less than $1 million, click here to book a 20-minute office hours call with our team to ask questions or get help with your application.
• Language or translation support: You must submit applications in English. If you are interested in language or translation support, please send your primary language to postsecondaryapplication+sp@stupski.org, and we will connect you with a vetted translator who can help you complete your application.
• If you prefer to review and submit a paper/hard-copy application, please send your mailing address to postsecondaryapplication+sp@stupski.org, and we will mail you a hard copy. 
• Additional questions? Email postsecondaryapplication+sp@stupski.org, and we will aim to reply within one to two working days.

The committee will review each organization’s application, website, and other publicly available materials. The group will evaluate each application based on the above criteria and meet together to reach a collective recommendation for which grants to fund.

Unfortunately, we anticipate receiving more applications than we can fund. After the committee makes a set of final recommendations, Stupski will send applicants an email indicating their proposal status. 

Questions? Please send questions to postsecondaryapplication+sp@stupski.org. We will aim to reply within one to two working days.

 

Key Dates

• May 17: Submit your application by 5pm PT
• May 18 to June 8: Committee reviews applications
• June 16 to June 30: Grant award notifications sent

 

Learn more about the Stupski Foundation and the context behind this grant opportunity

 

Stupski Foundation is a private spend down foundation that is investing all our assets by 2029 so one day everyone can benefit from the wealth of opportunities and resources in the places we call home. The Foundation focuses on food security, postsecondary success, early brain development, and serious illness care in San Francisco and Alameda Counties and Hawaiʻi. Learn more about our grant-making programs and why we are spending down.

In our postsecondary success area of focus, we aim to work collaboratively with community-based organizations to increase postsecondary graduation and living wage career attainment in the Bay Area and Hawaiʻi among students of color, students from rural communities, and students from under-resourced communities. We hope to help cultivate more flexible, affordable, and student-centered systems of education and work. 

One of the ways we’ve done that is through funding organizations working to build student political power. After forming relationships with and making grants to several organizations in this area, we wanted to center the young folks and students impacted by this work in the decision-making process. 

To do that, we held several collaborative co-design sessions in late 2022 to engage young folks and students in designing a community-centered, accessible, and equitable grant-making process. The grant opportunity outlined above and the process around it is the product of that co-design.