Spring Project: Individual Progress Report

I have researched grant writing strategies, as well as the background of the Food For Thought Cafe. I also have contributed to our group decision-making process. I am going to be participating in our planned volunteer outing with Portland Parks and Recreation this Saturday. So far, I have fulfilled my part of our project (with the exception of missing a meeting last week).

The only problem we have run into, and it is a major one, is the realization that FFT is not actually a non-profit. This is making it highly problematic to find an organization that will be willing to give them a grant. We as a group may have underestimated the amount of time and energy required to write a grant as well.

To remedy these issues we can do a few things. In terms of finding an organization to write the grant to, we have two things to do. First, we will make a concerted effort to find an organization that we can target our grant to, while we are writing the parts of the grant that we don't have to tailor to the organization. Second, if we are unable to find a specific organization to submit the grant to, we will target it more generally and leave the work of finding a compatible organization to FFT.

The second problem is unfortunately intractable. The only thing we can do to remedy it is to work hard and do everything we can to make sure we complete our grant on time.

I didn't realize that FFT was actually turning a profit, as I had assumed that they were a non-profit. This fact makes it seem kind of silly to me that they would need help from a grant to maintain their facilities. They have profits, why can't they use them to pay for the maintenance? They don't have shareholders that they need to pay dividends to, so where is all that money going?

With respect to strategies for completing our project, I think we really just need to keep to our timeline, and we should be fine. I don't foresee anything that could be a larger problem than the ones we have already encountered.