Childcare Grant Guidelines
Deadlines
2025 Childcare Grants
• Application available online December 18, 2024
• Application due January 17, 2025
• Decision date April 10, 2025
Threshold Criteria for Childcare Application
1. All prospective grant applicants must contact the Foundation’s Executive Director before submitting an application. Grant applications will not be considered without the Foundation Executive Director’s explicit consent.
2. All organizations applying for a grant must be within the Foundation’s geographic target area: 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 applicants must be 501(C)3 nonprofit organizations.
4. All applicant must have current audited financial statements and be financially sound.
5. All applicants must be licensed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and be NEAYC accredited.
6. Applicants must have a minimum of 50% subsidized childcare slots.
7. All applicants for funding must be in good standing with the Foundation. For existing grantees, this requires that all previous grant reporting has been completed promptly and appropriately.
8. Existing childcare grantees may only apply to the Foundation once every rolling two-year period. If your last application was not funded, you may apply in successive years. If your last grant was an emergency grant (childcare or shelter), this waiting period does not apply.
Application Requirements
2025 Childcare grant applications will be made available online Wednesday, December 18, 2024.
1. The Foundation must receive an electronic copy of your application by 5:00pm on Friday, January 17, 2024. Your application is officially submitted when you receive a confirmation receipt of the electronic copy.
2. Once you have completed and submitted the application electronically, you must send a hard copy of the application and all of the attachments to Franklin Square House Foundation, PO Box 78037 Belmont, MA 02478. Your application will not be eligible for review without a hard copy submission.
3. Once you have submitted both the electronic version and the hard copy of the application, you will receive an email confirming 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. 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. Take advantage of 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.
7. For grant applications over $50,000 you must show that you have obtained (or applied for) additional funding for the project that will match dollar for dollar any funds requested greater than the initial $50,000. Your application must show documentation and/or all efforts to obtain the matching funds. 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 these applications (it is acceptable to say you will be applying for something if the timing is reasonable).
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 useful life of 10 years.
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 term. 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: Please note the previous grant agreement required you to submit a closeout report no later than 12 months after your award. If this paperwork is missing from your file when we receive an inquiry about a grant, we will not allow you to apply.
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 from the Foundation until those funds are expended and a close out form is submitted.
13. Grants are judged on their readiness to proceed upon funding. The proposed work that you are seeking funding for must begin within 90 days of the potential grant award letter date.
Things We Do Not Fund
• Operating costs
• Landscaping (unless it relates to playground or safety concerns)
• 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
Below are the criteria used in evaluating grant requests and establishing priority rankings:
• 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 more 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 nine 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 as requested by the Foundation
• Results of the Foundation site visit
Next Steps
1. The Foundation will send you a confirmation email once it has received both the electronic version and the hard copy of your application.
2. After receiving both the electronic and hard copy, the Executive Director and staff will review the application for completeness. As part of our standard follow-up, you will receive an email, or a series of emails, seeking additional clarification on parts of your application during this review.
3. If we have an interest in proceeding with your project and organization, you will be contacted to schedule a site visit. We would like to meet your staff, become familiar with your organization, view your facility and operations, and see the proposed project.
This site visit usually involves the Foundation's Executive Director, a staff member, and at least two Foundation board members. Since scheduling these meetings can be complicated, the proposed date and time of the site visit will likely be limited. These site visits will likely occur in mid February and early March 2025.
The Executive Director or the Chief Operating Officer of your organization is required to be at the site visit, unless the Foundation’s Executive Director has made express allowances.
4. Once the site visit is complete, a Foundation board member who attended the site visit will present your project at the April 10, 2025 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