Deadline: 25-Feb-22
The Sauer Family Foundation has announced a funding call to serve children who are at-risk or experiencing abuse or neglect, exposed to toxic stress/trauma, or have challenges developing reading, writing and math skills.
The best use of Sauer Family Foundation funding is to create change, fill gaps, or help create something new in an organization, government agency, or system. The Sauer Family Foundation is particularly interested in grants that support work in systems and agencies that keep children in safe, supported families, decrease toxic stress and move them to resiliency.
Funding Priorities
The Foundation will fund direct service, research, field building, and systems change efforts in the following areas:
- Building Strong Family Relationships: Prevention and Intervention in Child Welfare
- Reducing child welfare placements away from family through parent support and family treatment services.
- Increasing family finding and natural connections for children & youth in child welfare. The focus is reunification with primary caregiver, supporting kinship foster care & kinship permanency.
- Meeting the social emotional needs of foster children & youth and decreasing time to permanency, stopping the exit to homeless youth services.
- Increasing opportunities for the voice of foster youth in advocacy and increasing public awareness of the foster care experience.
- Building Resilience to Trauma
- Prevention and early intervention models that support children as they develop adaptive and flexible coping skills for trauma.
- Professional development in trauma-informed practices in child welfare, children’s mental health and education; including resiliency to secondary trauma.
- Building Educational Success for Children: Literacy Skills and Learning Disabilities in Reading, Writing and Math PreK – 8th Grade
- Expansion of structured literacy and interventions based on the Science of Reading.
- Adoption of assessments that are indicated for learning disability screening and identification.
- Expansion of the accessibility and affordability of learning disability assessments and interventions.
- Building a Workforce that Reflects the Diversity of Minnesota’s Children: Racially Equitable Career Pathways in the Funding Areas
- Programs that remove barriers for Black, Indigenous and People of Color to enter careers in child welfare, children’s mental health or education.
- Nontraditional pathways that lead to licensure and can move candidates from paraprofessional to professional positions in child welfare, children’s mental health, or education.
- Programs that increase support and mentoring for professionals of color in child welfare, children’s mental health or education allowing them to thrive.
Criteria
These are the steps for applying for a grant from the Sauer Family Foundation:
- Read through the Funding page of the website and identify alignment between your organization or project and one of the funding priorities.
- Contact the staff person whose name is associated with the funding priority that fits your work. Send an email telling them you are interested in applying and give them a brief description of the work. Be aware that funds are awarded 6 weeks after the grant deadline so plan accordingly.
- If you and the staff person decide together that the work you are proposing is a good partnership, you will be connected to the Grants Manager. She will give you a code to connect to the online grant system to begin the application process. You will also receive a pdf of the proposal so you can preview the questions. If you have problems with the grant system technology, you will contact the Grants Manager. If you are unsure of how to answer a question in the proposal, you will contact the staff person associated with the funding priority.
- The deadlines for proposals are listed at the top of the page. If you have started a proposal but you are not able to complete the proposal by the deadline, please contact your designated staff person.
- Once your proposal is submitted, the staff will review the grant proposal including a financial review of the organization, to determine if it will be presented to the board of trustees for their review. A site visit or meeting may be set up to learn more about the work at any time in this process.
- The board of trustees and staff discuss the proposals and make decisions at the board meeting, usually 4-6 weeks after the grant deadline. You will be contacted by email and informed whether the grant proposal has been approved or denied.
All applicants must comply with all Federal, State and local non-discrimination laws. The Sauer Family Foundation does not make grants to individuals, political and lobbying activities, endowments, deficit or debt reduction, fundraising activities or advertising.
Eligibility Criteria
- The Foundation will fund in the state of Minnesota with priority given to the seven-county metro area.
- This includes schools and early childhood settings, non-profit and research organizations, government agencies, collaboratives, and networks.
For more information, visit https://www.sauerff.org/funding
