Once upon a time, I served a year as an AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteer at a small and young Maine nonprofit. This organization, like many of its kind, had been started, organized, and run by volunteers with a lot of passion and very little spare time or experience to devote to securing funding for their work.
When I started my VISTA year, the volunteer staff was feeling burned out and disheartened. They wondered if what they were doing meant anything to anyone other than the 50 or so people they served.
Part of my job as a VISTA was to research and write grants, and one of the first applications I wrote was to MaineCF’s Community Building Grant Program.
Three months later, when a letter from MaineCF arrived saying that our local county committee had decided to fund our project, we literally jumped for joy. I think one of the volunteers even cried.
Community Building grants are not big. In fact, it’s rare for MaineCF’s county and regional committees to award grants of more than $3,000. But what they symbolize is equally important. In our case, receiving the grant meant that a group of people representing the whole county, from many different walks of life, believed in the work we were doing. That vote of confidence was at least as important as the support we received.
JaneA Kelley is a communications and marketing associate at MaineCF. Her AmeriCorps*VISTA year inspired her to keep working to make the world a better place—and led to the career change that brought her to the Maine Community Foundation.