The 2024 Community Experts Team (CET) just came to a close, after holding its first in-person retreat in Buffalo, NY. The Community Experts Team is a group of young people from geographic areas that Tower funds: Erie and Niagara Counties in Western New York, and Barnstable, Dukes, Essex, and Nantucket Counties in Eastern Massachusetts who have lived experience in the Tower Foundation’s focus areas: intellectual and learning disabilities, mental health challenges, and substance use disorders. The team is brought together to design a grant opportunity, review applications, and ultimately determine funding for the Community Experts Grant. Since 2019, the Tower Foundation has evolved its participatory grantmaking program, expanding the opportunity each year. Read about the history of the program here.
Due to the distance between team members, the majority of the team member meetings took place via video calls. Tower has also arranged regional meet-ups for team members to meet each other who are local to the area. However, this year was the first time that the whole team was invited to gather in-person to deliberate among the reviewed applications and come to a funding decision together.
From April through August, the team met over Zoom to discuss the criteria they wanted to include in this year’s RFP and what they wanted to prioritize, ultimately choosing programs that promote youth leadership. After preparing the RFP, notice of the opportunity was shared to potential grantees and the applications came rolling in. This year for the first time, review partners–staff members from organizations within Tower’s focus area, were invited to individually review and score the 39 submitted applications based on a co-created rubric along with the team members. The CET and review partners’ months of meetings and review culminated in a day-long retreat in Buffalo to deliberate over the grants they believed had the strongest proposals.
Team members and review partners from out of town arrived the night before the retreat. During May and June, a local meet-up for Community Experts was held in each of the Tower Foundation’s geographic areas. However, many of the out-of-town members met for the first time in-person sharing a meal together that night. The next morning, both local and out-of-town team members united at a shared community organization space in Buffalo to hold their grant review, with three members joining virtually.
To start the day, the team shared breakfast and introduced themselves before taking part in a grounding yoga session. The team then reviewed the agenda for the day and the desired outcome: to award $225,000 worth of grants to the strongest of the 39 projects that promoted youth development and leadership for young people within the Tower Foundation’s focus and geographic areas. The team reviewed the guidelines, recognizing that decisions would be majority based and not necessarily unanimous. Using the scores that team members had submitted prior to the retreat, the group divided applications by the lowest and highest scores, trying to reach consensus on a few applications to eliminate off the bat. No application was eliminated based on score alone if a team member wanted to advocate for it or discuss it beforehand. Many did speak up to make their case for an application they believed had been wrongfully overlooked, or to share how an organization had personally impacted them or someone close to them. This request to reconsider a low scoring application regularly sparked a change of heart that could shift the team into returning an applicant back into the running. At minimum, speaking up for a less favored application would inspire the team to recognize its strengths and the importance of a program in a team member’s life, even while the group ultimately chose to move along with removing it from the final choice of awardees.
The retreat followed a similar pattern of discussing a set of applications, deliberating, and voting, with plenty of breaks in between. To keep the process engaging, different ways of discussing and voting on applications were employed throughout the day, including a lightning round in which team members passed a squishy ball around as a talking piece and a voting round in which team members used colorful sticky notes to indicate their top and bottom three applications. As the day progressed, awarded applications and remaining funds were marked to keep the status of funding at the top of mind. Team members considered the split between programs funded in New York vs. Massachusetts, as well as the distribution of applications targeting each of Tower’s focus areas, making sure to include all focus areas within the set of awardees. While the process of whittling down the pool of applicants was difficult, the team ultimately agreed to fund the following outstanding organizations:
- Behavioral Health Innovators
- Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology
- Buffalo String Works
- GLYS Western New York
- KenTon Big Picture Program
- Latham Centers
- Mass Audubon
- Rock Autism
- SafeBAE
- Sharing Kindness
- The Prevention Council of Erie County
Please check out this video filmed during the grant retreat for a closer look at what the day was like and to hear what the team said about their experience!
After a long day of hard work, the team headed over to Niagara Falls for a ride on the Maid of the Mist and a group dinner. The Falls were a real treat, especially for the out-of-towners, most of whom had never visited Buffalo.
The first in-person retreat was a great success, bringing together team members from Massachusetts and New York, and rolling out the new position of review partners. As we begin planning and recruiting for 2025, we look forward to learning what the new group of team members will share with each other and what type of programs they plan to fund our next round!