Process and Schedule of Disbursing Funds
Between Oct. 3 – 19th applications will be reviewed. Once they select the projects, they’ll work with legal departments for each winning neighborhood to come up with mechanism of money disbursement depending on project and organization involved (ie. HOA or individuals). There will be different mechanisms for how money is disbursed.
After Oct. 19th the attorneys will make sure there are no final problems, and then put together the scope of work, provide a legal agreement for how they can measure how the project goals are reached, and a mechanism for how the money is paid out to recipients. So, doing that in less than 2 weeks (ie. by Halloween) is unlikely. However, if we are approved, they would most likely be able to reimburse whatever we spend for a Halloween event, when the money comes around November. But we shouldn’t plan on anything until we know for certain that we won. So we can’t plan a Halloween event until Oct. 20th when we know for sure we won. By Oct. 20th he expects to be notifying awardees.
How many people would be considered a good-sized event?
Even 30-40 people at an event would be a great number. 200 people at an event is great.
The hard part would be what a proper ask would be - would we reduce our chances if we asked for $2000 for food for one event? He suggests we try to come up with the max number of people that we think would show up. Don’t go too overboard. Come up with these ideas and events, and petition the neighbors. So when we ask the neighbors, we can ask for a tentative RSVP to get some kind of idea. If we say “We’ve petitioned 60 houses, and 40% of them said they would go, we then extrapolate that about 40% of the houses in our neighborhood would likely go. If we can say something like 40% of the houses are likely to come, and that represents 180 people,” or something like that that would be good. And we can request a food budget from that, and put it in our submission.
Food restrictions
The City of Fort Collins will not pay for ANY beverages at all. No water, no soda, no juice, no nothing. The city doesn’t buy bottled water because it’s not sustainable. So they don’t do beverage because “return on investment is low” and someone always has concerns for the beverage choices and health choices (which is weird).
They also will not pay for any plates, cups, utensils, etc because it’s not sustainable. They want as little waste as possible, essentially, so they won’t pay for that. They said they’d probably pay for us to rent plates and utensils, like from a catering company. But not purchasing paper or plastic utensils. We could also tell people to bring their own stuff to any of the events.
IF WE TALK ABOUT THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE PROGRAM IN THE APPLICATION THEN IT COULD BE A MUCH BIGGER SELLING POINT.
