Housing and Shelter Grant Guidelines
Deadlines
2025 Housing and Shelter Grants
• Application available online June 18, 2025
• Application due July 17, 2025
• Decision date October 16, 2025
Threshold Criteria for Housing and Shelter Application
1. Prospective grant applicants must contact the Executive Director of the Foundation prior to submitting a grant application. No grant applications will be considered without the previous explicit consent of the Executive Director of the Foundation.
2. 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 grant applicants must be 501(C)3 nonprofit organizations.
4. All applicants must have audited financial statements and be in sound financial condition at the time of application to the Foundation.
5. Grants must target projects that support women and women and their children.
6. All potential grantees must be in good standing with the Foundation. No applications will be accepted if the potential grantee has an outstanding grant that has not been expended or has not filed all required closeout reports on previous grants.
7. The Foundation will not fund work that is already in progress or completed.
8. All potential grant applicants cannot have received a grant in the last shelter funding round to apply in the current round, (this requirement does not apply if your last grant was an emergency grant).
Application Requirements
1. An electronic copy of your application must be received, by the Foundation by 5pm on Thursday July 17, 2025. Your application will be officially considered submitted when you receive a confirmation of receipt of the electronic copy.
2. Once you have completed and submitted the application electronically, please send a hard copy of the application to Franklin Square House Foundation, PO Box 78037 Belmont, MA 02478. Without a hard copy submission, your application will not be eligible for review.
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 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 are not acceptable. Ignoring this requirement will result in immediate rejection of your application.
5. Please pay particular attention to the last question in the application. It is there to allow grantees to put their best foot forward. Do not miss the opportunity. We will look at any and all materials you send us.
6. The maximum Shelter 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. The application must show documentation of all efforts to obtain the matching funds.
If your organization is applying for other grants as matching funds, it is required to provide a matrix listing grants applied for (or planning to apply for), how much the grant is expected to receive, timing of the submission and award, and status of the applications (it is acceptable to say your organization “will be” applying for grant funding if you can identify the source and the timing still works within our guidelines).
8. Existing shelter 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, either childcare or shelter, this waiting period does not apply.
9. Grantees must own the facility they are proposing to improve, or have a minimum of 10 years left on the lease. In the instance of a lease, you will be asked to provide the lease.
10. All grant improvements made with grant funds and all purchases of FF&E are considered to have a ten-year useful life.
11. If a grantee sells a facility (or terminates the lease at the facility) upon which a grant has been made before the end of the ten year useful life 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 of grantee action in this regard, must be brought to the immediate attention of the Foundation.
12. Existing grantees: please make note of the requirement in the previous grant agreement of submitting a closeout report or a project update. If this paperwork is missing from your file at the time we receive a new grant proposal from you, we will not consider your proposal.
13. If you received a grant from the Foundation in a previous round and you have yet to expend those funds, your organization may not apply for a new grant from the Foundation until those funds are expended and a close out form is submitted.
14.Grants are judged based on their readiness to proceed upon funding. The proposed work that you are seeking funding for must be started within 90 days from the date of the potential award letter.
Things We Do Not Fund
• Operating costs
• Landscaping
• Project design, management or overhead
• Grant administration
• Back-up generators
• Relocation
• Vehicles
• Computers
• Work in progress or already completed
• Grants to permanent housing projects
• Projects that have developer's fees
• Grants into capital campaigns for larger project
Evaluating and Ranking Criteria
1. Creation of new transitional units, rooms or beds
2. Preservation of existing units, rooms or beds through capital improvements that rectify security, life safety, or building code issues
3. Administrative capacity of the organization
4. Track record of the organization
5. Past standing of the grantee with the Foundation
6. Alignment of the organization and the project with the mission and goals of the Foundation
7. The presence and status of matching funds (if required)
8. Completeness and coherence of the grant application
9. 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
10. The responsiveness of the grantee to requests for supplemental information regarding the grant proposal
11. The results of the Foundation site visit
Next Steps
1. You will receive a confirmation email once both the electronic version and the hard copy of your application has been received by the Foundation.
2. After receiving both the electronic and hard copy, the application will then be reviewed for completeness by the Executive Director and staff. As part of our standard follow-up, you will receive one or more emails seeking additional clarification on parts of your application during this review.
3. If the Foundation has an interest proceeding with the project and organization, you will receive a call to set up a site visit (that may or may not be virtual). During the site visit, we will have an opportunity meet your staff and become familiar with your organization, view your facility and operations, and see the proposed project.
This site visit usually consists of the Executive Director of the Foundation, a staff member, 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 the last two weeks of August and the first two weeks of September 2025.
Please Note: 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 approved 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 October 9, 2025 Board meeting. All decisions regarding grant applications are made at that meeting.