Keen Effect offering up to $10,000 in cash to Grassroots NGOs in the United States

Deadline: 5-Feb-21

The Keen Effect is seeking applications for its KiDS Grant Program to fund the best grassroots organizations immersing kids in the outdoors.

Since 2014, Keen partners have brought thousands of youth outside for recreation, nature-based education, and environmental stewardship, actively building a future full of formative experiences and lasting values built in nature.

The Keen support programs inspiring outdoor participation, engaging underserved communities of youth with innovative and creative programming, and is willing to share their stories with KEEN’s audience.

Funding Information

With up to $10,000 cash as well as a $4,000 (MSRP) footwear product stipend per grant, the Keen support innovative programs inspiring outdoor access and inclusion for under-served or under-represented communities of kids.

Eligibility Criteria

Non-profits registered as a 501(c)(3) public charity with the Department of Treasury, educational institutions, community and civic organizations, hospital and healthcare agencies carrying out a mission of apolitical secular service are eligible to apply.
Any organization which holds values directly in conflict with the values of KEEN, Inc. are ineligible.

Application Criteria

Keen Effect KiDS Grants exist to help create a better world by reconnecting a generation of kids lost indoors. The Keen feel the best way to do that is to partner with organizations that know, invest in, and grow from a community. An ideal KEEN Effect KiDS Grant applicant:
- Uses innovative and creative programming to inspire kids to get outside
- Integrates recreation, education, and stewardship practices into the program
- Engages youth from communities that self-identy as under-resourced or under-represented in the outdoors
- Provides 80+ hours of outside time per student (our average grantee provides roughly 20,000 total kid-hours of programming per year)
- Wants to share their story with KEEN fans
Tips for writing a competitive application:
- Tell Keen what is unique about applicants program, mission, and community served.
- Express the urgency of applicants work – why they, and why now?
- Do not dwell on wider statistical trends of outdoor participation and its impacts, but instead on applicants own solutions.
- Be specific! Write for this application and for this season of programming.
- Draft all text responses in an offline document and paste into this application to avoid losing any information (this application cannot be saved and finished later)