Education & Research Contributions Program
Mission:
Provide education, research and other assistance to help farmers and other agricultural professionals remain competitive in a changing environment.
Funding Criteria:
- Focus on agriculture, entrepreneurship and business development.
- Provide exposure for Ag Ventures Alliance organization
- Provide value to AgVA members.
Guidelines:
- Work with existing structure to “complement” (not compete) with existing players
- Provide only short-term (one or two years) funding opportunities (due to AgVA’s uncertainty about future revenue.)
- Investigate potential to leverage our funding with USDA and other grants (e.g. Cooperative Development Center).
- Assess and compare impact per dollar of contribution
- Geographic equality
- Assess community versus individual impact
- Include some youth activities.
Geographic Priorities:
- First priority is counties in which governing and associate AgVA board members reside.
- Second priority is geographic area in which significant numbers of AgVA members reside
- Third priority is Iowa and Minnesota
- Fourth priority is national
Proposal Requirements:
Below is the outline organizations will use in requesting contributions.
- Name of Requesting Organization
- Amount of Funds Requested
- Overview of the requesting organization
- Description of the specific activities for which the funds will be used. This includes a description of how these activities will meet the funding criteria guidelines, geographic priorities and other factors including target audience, estimated number of individuals reached and estimated impact of the activity, etc..
- Budget that lists revenue and expenditures for this activity.
- A list of the organization’s current board with officers indicated.
- A statement of the organization’s or project’s IRS tax status indicating if it currently qualifies as a 501(C)(3) organization.
- Identify at least one person who can answer questions relating to the above information and provide a daytime telephone number.
Requests Not Considered:
- Political organizations and candidates
- Sectarian or denominational religious groups
- Purchase of tickets or items for any fund-raising event.
- Dues or memberships
Timeline:
Requests must be submitted on the AgVA Education and Research Contributions Committee Funding Request Form. Committee will meet quarterly to assess and decide on contribution requests
- These meetings will be held during the first week of January, April, July and October.
- Requests must be received by the 15th of the month prior to the meeting month.
- Special meetings can be held for special funding circumstances.
