District Grant Sustainability Policy
District Managed Grants Sustainability Policy
Any projects that you want to do with support from a district managed grant have to meet the Rotary Foundation goal of sustainability. This means primarily two things from a practical perspective:
(a) if one of the components of your project is that you are donating equipment to a partner organization, then you need to ensure that this partner organization will commit to being responsible for the maintenance of that equipment going forward, and that you need to have a letter of support from that partner organization that says so; and
(b) you should not be doing the exact same project with the exact same partner year after year, even if it serves a new cohort of recipients in subsequent years, because it has the potential to make the partner organization rely on Rotary for ongoing operational funding year-after-year, and because this approach of doing projects is not sustainable. For example, donating dictionaries to the same school year after year is not a sustainable use of Rotary Foundation funds, even if it can be argued that each year you would be serving a new class of kids. You can still do such a project, if it is meaningful to your Rotary Club members, and if they want to donate the monies for such a project, but you cannot apply for a district managed grant and get Rotary Foundation monies for such a project going forward.
However, identifying a capable non-profit organization as a project partner and developing a long-term strategic relationship with them to improve the lives of people in their community is aligned with the strategic goals of the Rotary Foundation, so working with the same partner on different projects in subsequent years is sustainable and qualifies for applying for district grant funding, provided that (i) this doesn't create a dependency on Rotary funding; (ii) the partner organization clearly is capable of ensuring sustainability for every single project that is undertaken in cooperation with them; and (iii) this is not used to distribute a multi-year improvement/expansion project of one and the same facility overy a sequence of one-year district grants year after year.
