Literacy Volunteers of Southwest Minnesota
Report date
October 2018
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
One of the most useful activities actually happened early in the process when representatives from our organization were able to participate in a Bush sponsored event for grant recipients. We found the event to be well-planned, inspiring, and eminently practical. By interacting with peers and hearing from experts in a range of disciplines, this event afforded us a space where we could reflect on our goals and tactics and identify potential pitfalls moving forward. We found the interaction with representatives from other organizations especially valuable for at least two reasons. The first is that it helped us to get a sense of how other small nonprofit organizations the rural Midwest are forming community partnerships to serve the needs of their community. The second is that it allowed us to see how these same organizations have dealt with common challenges related to things like management of finances, board leadership, fund raising, and the recruitment of volunteers. We left this event with a clear sense that the Bush Foundation had the resources and professional expertise to help our organization achieve the goals we had set out in our Community Innovation Grant application.
One last thought
Our organization experienced a major disruption when our founder and executive director experienced a family emergency and was forced to resign. It is now clear that our board should have been more involved with day to day operations of programs. When she stepped away, the board struggled to make sense of finances, and in particular the relationship of grant funding to program expenses. We responded by consulting with our accounting firm. They were able to explain how accounts had been coded. After reviewing the language of the grant agreement, they agreed with us that we would be justified in recoding certain expenses to the CI grant. They subsequently worked with us to recode these expenses dating back to the start of the grant period. To be clear, none of this should be taken to mean our former executive director did anything wrong. To the contrary, she held herself to high professional standards. The board simply concluded her stance on what should be coded to the CI grant was too conservative. We appreciate that staff from the Bush Foundation were willing to consult with us as we worked through the process of reviewing the grant agreement and recoding expenses.