Funding-group

ToDo list

• Edit Store planning docs on wiki, as follow-up to planning-interview with Luiz, then check with him and other store folk for review.
• Find information on previous grants applied for, drafted, received, and their follow-up information.

Presenting to Council

The Funding Group (Mateo, Renee, Luiz, Tony, Richard and myself) is ready to present its background work to Community Council for direction on next steps. --ks 22:40, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Recent history of Funding Group activities

The Free Geek Funding Group was born in March 2009, as a spin-off from Public Relations (PR). The Free Geek Funding Group has been meeting weekly, every Thursday morning at 10 AM, since April 2nd and working for roughly 4 to 6 hours Thursdays, in our out of the building. Meetings have been for reports about previous work, and discussion with staff about current Free Geek operations affecting Funding. Most of the working-time is spent on reviewing existing documents (between meetings), updating links and writing overviews of Funding related processes.

• (April 2009) Grant Writing Triage & Category: Grantwriting: Our first step was to document what should be done when a grant opportunity arises.
• (May 2009) Meta Fund Raising: Our next step was to step back and look at all the factors affecting funding decisions. And there are lots. Our board member, Marie helped with this, by presenting twice on this topic, once for Funding Group, and once for an open staff meeting. Thanks Marie!
• (June) Free Geeks not Freemasons: I took a perspective "step back" to state something about "freedom" in Free Geek.
• (June-July 2009) Category:Long Term Planning: From June 3rd to July 2nd 2009 I read and studied connections between wiki pages, creating links between grants, funding, big picture, long term planning, strategic planning, space use, and other topic documents.
• (July) General_Priorities & Talk:General_Priorities: Most recently we have been comparing (A) recent Council brainstorms on Free Geek direction, and (B) previously established priorities documented by the (now retired) Optimization and Priorities group. Renee did the line by line comparisons and documented the differences in tables on these pages. Yeay Renee! We also started our first interviews with Free Geek program area folk. The store was the first area we interviewed. We (I) asked Luiz: Which of these (five?) wiki pages about store plans and priorities are the most up to date? Which ones have good formats and ideas, even if they need updating? How can we help you update these planning documents? (The Funding Group could use help in fulfilling the task-list generated by those meetings.)

Next steps for Funding Group, and help needed from Community Council

Funding Group needs to know the answer when potentially large donors ask:
"What direction is Free Geek going, and how does it plan on getting there?"

Council is the place for these kinds of big picture questions about Free Geek direction. So Funding has found itself joining the stream of the ongoing Council discussions on the general direction of Free Geek. So what are the questions we are taking to Council? There are a bunch of large questions to address, but:

the ultimate goal is to better prepare  funding folk, to answer this question from potentially large donors:

"How can I help?"

We already know how to answer the question about how to help, from most people:

• For donating hardware: http://www.freegeek.org/donate
• For contributing financially: http://www.freegeek.org/donate/philanthropy/
• For giving time and expertise: http://www.freegeek.org/volunteer

But big donors want grant applications, so they can get answers to the big questions about where Free Geek is going, what it will accomplish, where its coming from, and its likelihood of success.

Background on the Free Geek Council

Renee and Kathey combined the Longterm Planning General Priorities and Council Priorities and created a condensed list of the priorities that are on Free Geek's and Council's radar. It is up to Council to choose the top priorities for consideration.

General information about the Free Geek Community Council role can be found here:

• Council Orientation
• Community Council: The place to find meeting minutes
• Founding Document of the Council

Long Term Planning

A season of fundraising meetings have evolved into an effort to get Long Term Planning visions up to date. The fundraising group is currently reviewing wiki documents and interviewing Free Geek project coordinators. When all of Free Geek can speak with coherence on its long term plans, fundraising efforts can focus on rallying support from donors and others, on that set of plans.

--ks 20:22, 2 July 2009 (UTC)