Grant-Making Program Coordination

Since 2018, I have conducted a grant-making process. The process included putting together a call for proposals, and bringing together a panel of experts from different fields within the University of Arizona and the community to evaluate the proposals we received. I facilitated the discussions with the panelists and helped them go through the guidelines established by the program. Once the board of directors approved the recommendation for funding made by the experts, I followed up with the award letters and thank-you notes. The process continued by scheduling and facilitating project kick-off meetings and semi-annual conversations with the awardees during the project's term. The awardees submitted annual reports through a web form I designed and set up on the program's website. I was also in charge of collecting and analyzing the data from the web forms to inform the board. I also designed and maintained an awardee database on FileMaker.

As part of our support, we offered our awardees several workshops, including communications, teamwork, and project evaluation, some of which I attended. I was also in charge of communicating our awardees' success through stories I published on our website and social media. The production of these stories allowed me to deeply understand the projects and inform the project's outcomes to a diverse audience. The grant-making process and the database maintenance and analysis required a high degree of detail.

One of the most rewarding things about this program is meeting people who are passionate about their work, whether they are researchers, organizers working in non-profit organizations, authorities, and grassroots community leaders. All these different voices fuel life-changing decision-making. In my position as Program Coordinator for the Agnese Nelms Haury Program at the University of Arizona, I learned to listen and raise my voice.