Philanthropy Southwest Members Lead Development of Common Grant Application

A group of funders in North Texas has developed a Common Grant Application to address the burden placed on nonprofit organizations seeking funding from multiple foundations, each of whom have their own specialized applications. Project Streamline, a national initiative, challenged grantmakers to take a fresh look at information requirements with a special focus on what due diligence grantmakers truly need to do in order to make a grant. Through a series of meetings, an application was developed in which grantseekers can work from a common set of questions while still aligning requests to each foundation’s own guidelines. The common grant application was beta tested with local nonprofit organizations to create this final form.

Special thanks to The Central Texas Education Funders for “open sourcing” their common grant form and allowing us to use it as a starting point. In this spirit, the North Texas common grant application is available for all foundations to use. The master form is stored on the Communities Foundation of Texas website.  Any foundation that accepts this form can be added to the list on the website.

An online version of the Common Grant Application has been created in Foundant by the Carl B. & Florence E. King Foundation and has been transferred to other foundations using Foundant. If you are a Foundant user and are interested in utilizing the form created for the Foundant for GLM platform, please contact Christopher Shaw christophershaw@gfyfoundation.org.

The partner foundations that are currently accepting the common grant application include:

  Carl B. & Florence E. King Foundation                    
  Communities Foundation of Texas                   
  Dallas Women's Foundation 
  Embrey Family Foundation                                                        
  The Miles Foundation                                                  
  The M.R. and Evelyn Hudson Foundation
  The Boone Family Foundation                           
  The Dallas Foundation                                         
  The George and Fay Young Foundation, Inc.  
  The Meadows Foundation
  The Mike & Mary Terry Family Foundation  
  Redman Foundation
  The Rees-Jones Foundation                                
  The Thompson Family Foundation
  Vickery Meadows Youth Foundation

Note: If you are applying to one of these foundations during their regular grant process, please use their suggested format/method of submission. Information on how to apply to each partnering foundation can be found on their individual websites.

Click here to download the North Texas Common Grant application.

Other Common Grant Applications from around Philanthropy Southwest's region are available in the right-hand column. Have one to add? Let us know!