Childcare Grant Guidelines
Deadlines
2024 Childcare Grants
• Application available online December 15, 2023
• Application due January 17, 2024
• Decision date April 3, 2024
Threshold Criteria for Childcare Application
1. Prospective grant applicants must contact the Executive Director of the Foundation prior to submitting a grant application (you have probably done this already if I have sent you these guideline).
2. Organizations applying for a grant must be within Barnstable County, Bristol County, Dukes County, Nantucket County, Essex County, Middlesex County, Plymouth County, Norfolk County, Suffolk County and those parts of Worcester County that are east of (or bisected by) routes 395, 290, 190 and including a line extending from the northern limit of the end of route 195 to the New Hampshire border. This includes the communities of Leominster, Fitchburg and Gardner.
3. All grant applicants must be 501(C)3 nonprofit organizations.
4. All grantees must have audited financial statements and be in sound financial condition
5. All grant applicants must be licensed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and be NEAYC accredited
6. Applicants must, at a minimum, have 50% subsidized childcare slots
7. All applicants for funding must be in good standing with the Foundation. For existing grantees, this entails that all previous grant reporting has been completed in a timely and appropriate manner.
Application Requirements
2024 Childcare grant applications will be made available online Monday, December 15, 2023.
1. An electronic copy of your application must be received, by the Foundation by 5:00pm on Wednesday, January 17, 2024. Your application is officially considered submitted when you receive a confirmation receipt of the electronic copy.
2. Once you have completed and submitted the application electronically, please send a hard copy of the application and all of the attachments to Franklin Square House Foundation, PO Box 78037 Belmont, MA 02478. Without a hard copy submission, your application will not be eligible for consideration.
3. Once you have submitted both the electronic version of the application and the hard copy, you will receive an e-mail confirming that the full application has been received.
4. Grant applications must include a contractor level bid for the work to be done (only one is required), and/or vendor pricing for furniture, fixtures, and equipment. 1. Estimates of these numbers will not be considered acceptable and will result in automatic rejection of the application.
5. Please pay particular attention to the last question in the application to include any additional materials or information. Do not overlook this opportunity to highlight your organization. The question exists to allow grantees to put their best foot forward. We will look at any and all materials you send.
6. The maximum Childcare Grant is $100,000. If the cost of the work you wish to perform is greater than your request to the Foundation, you must provide evidence of plans to pay for the remaining balance of the work. If you are applying for other grants, please provide a detailed table of grants applied for, amounts expected to receive, timing of the submission and award, and status of application (it is acceptable to say you will be applying for something).
7. Existing grantees of the Foundation may only apply to the Foundation once every rolling two-year period. You may only apply in successive years if your last application was not funded. If your last grant was an emergency grant (childcare or shelter) this waiting period does not apply.
8. Grantees must own the facility they are proposing to improve, or have a minimum of 10 years left on the lease. In the case of a lease, it is required to provide a copy of the lease.
9. All improvements made with grant funds and all purchases of FF&E (furniture, fixtures, and equipment) are considered to have a 10-year useful life.
10. If a grantee sells the facility (or terminates the lease at the facility) upon which a grant has been made before the end of the 10 years of that grant’s uses, the Franklin Square House Foundation reserves the right to recapture the prorated share of the grant based on the unelapsed time left on the grant’s life.Any consideration by the grantee to take action in this regard must be brought to the immediate attention of the Executive Director of the Foundation.
11. Existing grantees: Make note of the requirement in your previous grant agreement to submit a closeout report no later than 12 months from the date of your award. If this paperwork is missing from your file at the time we receive a new grant proposal from you, it will result in automatic rejection of the application.
12. If you received a grant from us in a previous round and you have yet to expend those funds, you may not apply for a new grant. Applications of this nature will be noted in any future requests to the Foundation.
123. Grants are judged based on their readiness to proceed upon funding. The proposed work that you are seeking funding for must begin no more than 90 days from the date of the potential grant award letter.
Things We Do Not Fund
• Operating costs
• Landscaping
• Grant administration
• Project design, management, overhead, or supervision
• Relocation
• Vehicles
• Computers
• Back-up generators
• Work in progress or already completed
• Manipulatives and teaching materials
• Requests to reduce loan debt
• Grants into capital campaigns for larger project
Evaluation and Ranking Criteria
• Creation of new childcare slots
• Administrative capacity of the organization
• Financial condition of the organization
• Track record of the organization
• Past standing of the grantee with the Foundation
• Alignment of the organization and the project with the mission and goals of the Foundation
• Proportions of subsidized slots to the overall population of the center. We generally like to see greater than our required minimum of 50% subsidized slots
• Completeness and coherence of the grant application
• Readiness to proceed with the project. All projects must be ready to start within 90 days of the date on the grant award letter and be completed within six months of the grant award
• The presence of slots reserved for homeless children
• The grantee’s offering of comprehensive services for families it serves (or access to those services through partnerships)
• The responsiveness of the grantee to requests for supplemental information regarding the grant proposal
• Results of the Foundation site visit
Next Steps
1. You will receive a confirmation email when the electronic version of your grant application is received and then again when the hard copy of your application has been received.
2. After receiving both the electronic and hard copy, the application will then be reviewed for completeness by the Executive Director. During this review you will receive an email, or a series of emails, regarding missing materials or seeking additional clarification on parts of your application. This is all part of our standard follow-up.
3. If we have an interest in finding out more about your project and your organization you will get a call to set-up a site visit. We like to take this opportunity to meet your staff, become familiar with your organization, view your facility, your operations and see the proposed project.
Our site visit usually consists of the Executive Director of the Foundation and a minimum of two Foundation Board members. Since the scheduling of these meetings can get quite complicated there will be little to no flexibility in the proposed date and time of the site visit. These site visits will most likely occur in mid to late August and early September.
It is required that the Executive Director or the Chief Operating Officer of your organization will be present at the site visit, unless express allowances have been permitted by the Foundation.
4. Once the site visit is complete, a Foundation board member who attended the site visit will present your project at the April 3, 2024 Board Meeting. All decisions regarding grant applications are made at that meeting.
Prospective grantees are required to contact the Foundation’s Executive Director prior to submitting a proposal. No proposals will be accepted without doing so.
Robert Goldstein, Executive Director, 617.312.3400