2024 Community Grants Program FAQs
501(c)(3) organizations, Tribal entities and government entities are eligible to apply for a grant. Additionally, organizations may work with a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor to apply. Applicants must submit formal paperwork confirming the fiscal sponsor relationship with their application.
Please note: Fiscal sponsorship materials will not be accepted past the application deadline of January 8, 2024.
Organizations that received a 2023 fall Community Grant award for capacity building, capital or project funding are NOT eligible for a spring 2024 Community Grant for general operating support.
Contact your regional program officer if you have questions about your organization’s eligibility.
To be competitive in the 2024 spring cycle, an organization must be either small and rural, culturally specific and/or culturally responsive. For more complete definitions of these terms, please see the FAQs below.
Your application should be submitted and received by January 8, 2024, at 5 pm. We experience an influx of submissions close to the deadline and highly recommend you submit your application and receive email confirmation of your submission via MyOCF. If you do not receive confirmation of your submission by email, your application has not been submitted. If you have questions about your application submission, please contact grants@oregoncf.org.
Email us at grants@oregoncf.org and we will get back to you as soon as we are able.
Typical ranges are $5,000 - $30,000. We will consider requests up to $40,000, especially for efforts that closely match Community Grants funding priorities, benefit priority populations, and clearly demonstrate the timeliness, feasibility and impact of an OCF grant of this size.
No. All 2024 grants will be one year in duration.
All eligible organizations based in Oregon or primarily serving Oregon communities are eligible to apply.
Yes – if you met the eligibility criteria for either fall or spring 2023 but did not receive funding you are eligible to apply again in spring 2024.
Yes, applications submitted to this program are reviewed independently from other OCF programs. Other applications with other grant programs will not affect your eligibility or competitiveness for this program.
In the context of OCF’s Community Grants Program, an organization is small and rural if they meet all of the following criteria:
- The organization is located in and serves a community or communities in Oregon with a population of 35,000 or fewer that is NOT directly adjacent to (or part of) a metropolitan area of 50,000 or more. This definition was developed by The Ford Family Foundation.
- The organization had less than $250,000 in cash expenses from the most recently completed fiscal year.
In the context of OCF’s Community Grants program, an organization is culturally specific if:
- Primarily serve one or more cultural communities.
- Leadership and staff represent the community served and its mission, activities and outreach intentionally focus on one or more cultural communities.
- The population served recognizes the organization as specific to their community.
- The organization demonstrates intimate knowledge of lived experience of the community, including, but not limited to, the impact of structural and individual racism or discrimination on the community; knowledge of specific disparities, barriers or challenges documented in the community and their influences on the structure of their program or service.
This concept was developed by the Coalition of Communities of Color.
Cultural responsiveness describes the capacity to respond to the issues of diverse communities. Organizations that are culturally responsive are those that:
- Provide services that have been adapted to maximize the respect of and relevance to the beliefs, practices, culture, and linguistic needs of diverse consumer/client populations and communities.
- Require knowledge and capacity at different levels of intervention: systemic, organizational, professional, and individual.
This concept was developed by the Coalition of Communities of Color.
Under-resourced communities have high proportions of low to moderate income residents and generally receive below average services and financial resources from government sources. Many, but not all, of them comprise an above average number of people of color, immigrants, and/or geographically-isolated individuals. People earn lower incomes due to many factors, but they often have been negatively impacted by social and economic marginalization. Some communities have been intentionally disenfranchised by decades of redlining and/or economic disinvestment that limits access to resources and services, devalues physical assets, and weakens community anchor institutions. Others may experience geographic isolation that results in limited investment in critical infrastructure such as medical facilities, internet connectivity and transportation. Combined, these conditions create what we refer to as under-resourced communities.
Your application will be accessible to OCF donors regardless of request type or size. We also encourage you to share information with donors by filling out the Organizational Profile Form on our website. The latter is not an application but does allow you to share your organization's needs with donors.
Approved and declined applicants will be notified by email in mid-May. Awards will be distributed on the same day via check or ACH.
Due to highly limited resources, we are prioritizing operating support requests to organizations who serve communities who have experienced historical underinvestment due to systems, practices, and policies. OCF aims to provide general operating support to communities who have been historically underrepresented in OCF's grantmaking, both in terms of requesting and receiving funding, and those who have not had the same level of access to outside sources of funding.
If your organization’s most urgent need is operating support but is not small and rural, culturally specific or culturally responsive, we encourage you to share your needs with donors by submitting information through the Organization Profile Form on our website. This form is not a grant application, but a tool to help OCF collect information on needs that can be shared with donors.
Questions are included in the Program Guidelines.
Review criteria are included in the Program Guidelines.
There are no reporting requirements for grantees that receive 2024 spring Community Grants award. However, grantees may receive an open invitation in 2024 to connect with a regional program officer to share more about the organization’s goals and explore how OCF can partner with the organization.
More information about the fall 2024 cycle will be available on our website in late spring/early summer.
We will update the program website and organizations within our network when we have the final program details to share.
OCF welcomes your written stories, videos and photos so we can share them with prospective donors and the public. Real stories from nonprofits help us secure more gifts, and that benefits the entire nonprofit community. Email them to communications@oregoncf.org.
Do you have blanket photo and video releases for everyone pictured? If not, please make sure they each complete an OCF Photo Release Form.