The Long-Term Impact of Grants

A Long-Term Solution

ECF seeks to create long-term solutions with our grants. One of our primary focuses in grantmaking is ensuring that our grants focus on sustainable support. Typically ECF’s grants fall into two types of funding – capital or capacity building. Requests for these kinds of grants may take different forms. For example, rather than funding food for one month, ECF might fund a new refrigerator so that food is safe and healthy for many months. ECF might also purchase a van for multiple transportation needs rather than funding a gas expense line for the year.

Capital vs. Capacity Building

Capital projects focus on funding physical needs that expand or improve your work, such as renovation/construction, equipment, or vehicles. This funding allows a grantee the ability to trust that this one item will provide years of opportunity and use.

Capacity building grants are all about increasing the grantee’s capacity to do more by obtaining or improving skills, knowledge, tools, and other resources to equip your ministry to perform with greater scale or impact. This may look like funding for a curriculum, piloting a program, or software implementation. Again, the goal is long-term training and giving people the opportunity to sustain their goals and mission.

Past Support

Historically, ECF has granted funds across a wide variety of needs. A few examples of capital funding include:

• Renovating a home owned by St. David’s Episcopal Church for a transitional housing facility in partnership with Family Promise of North Fulton/Dekalb.
• Providing startup supplies and materials for St. Mary & St. Martha of Bethany Episcopal Church for their Grow2B Community Garden, an agriculture-based ministry.
• Replacing Emmaus House‘s van used for transporting children for enrichment activities.

Some examples of capacity building grants include:

• Developing a long-term sustainable fundraising program for Wonderful Days Preschool, St. James Episcopal Church (Marietta)‘s tuition-free preschool for low-income families.
  
• Start-up costs for the new English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program at St. Clare’s Episcopal Church.
  
• Database implementation at Intown Cares (a partner of the Cathedral of St. Philip) which increases efficiencies for programming with people experiencing homelessness and food insecurity.

We are invested in making sure that our work has long-term, sustainable impact. This allows us to steward the generous gifts that Episcopalians have given to ECF over the last forty years!