The Grant Screening Board

The Grant Screening Board offers members an opportunity to work with other intelligent, philanthropically-inclined women in a challenging, educational, and collegial environment. Its members act as Foundation staff, performing the essential function of analyzing each applicant agency and its project for our members. Its goal is to narrow the applicant pool to the two candidates whose projects best address the critical unmet needs of children in that grant year. The GSB is open to all members and generally has a maximum of 20 spaces in addition to Executive Board officers.

The GSB has created a database for its members containing frequently used documents, prior years' grant proposals, and news or academic articles of interest. To access the database, click here.

To view the Final Proposals for our 2007 Grant and our summaries of them, click here.

I. Grant Screening Board Responsibilities and Timeline

We estimate that participation on the Grant Screening Board (GSB) requires a serious commitment of between 80 and 115 hours for the year, depending on how far the agency you review progresses in the selection process. To help you decide if you would like to join this essential board, we offer the following description of what we do and when we do it.

All of the routine 2008 GSB meetings will be held at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. The exceptions are the vote counting meeting which is usually at someone’s house, and the site visits which occur throughout the Los Angeles area. Most meetings and site visits start at 10AM. A few site visits occur in the afternoon so that we can see children in an after school program. Hours in red indicate additional time required if the applicant agency assigned to the member for review becomes a semi-finalist and/or finalist.

1. January - At our first meeting we teach our grantmaking process to our new members and review with our experienced members. We distribute the year’s schedule, go over our eligibility criteria, conduct a few practice analyses of hypothetical proposals, and talk about our upcoming meeting to review the Letters of Inquiry we have received. We also set our calendar and are generally able to work around school holidays and other commitments.

2. February - Letters of Inquiry submitted by our applicants (usually between 20 and 25) are mailed to GSB members in early February; members review them before our next meeting in late February. At this meeting we eliminate proposals or agencies that do not meet our eligibility criteria and analyze which proposals seem to address the most critical unmet needs of local children.

3. March - Members of last year’s “winning” team use documents from that agency to teach others how to conduct document review. Documents reviewed include: agency history, financial and tax data, strategic plans, donor bases, grant history, and other information we need to evaluate them as a candidate. We hold a meeting at which we review how to analyze these documents. The women on the GSB then divide into teams of two or three. Each team is generally assigned one project to review, and they receive their agency documents at the end of the meeting.

4. March/April - Each team skims their documents, then has a conference call with Marcia Antopol, our consultant, during which she helps them identify the “big picture” issues and answers general questions. After reviewing the documents, each team formulates in-depth questions for the agencies. We meet to hear each team’s recommendation about whether to go forward with the agency and prepare for our site visits at the continuing agencies.

5. May - GSB members, led by reviewing teams, visit each agency under consideration for our grant and interview the agency executives, board members, and staff to get a sense of the agency and the project. Our members then generally share their views by email after each visit.

6. June - We meet to discuss the site visits and to vote on the two agencies we will invite to submit lengthy final proposals.

7. August - In late August, the reviewing teams whose agencies have become finalists review the draft of their agency’s final proposal. This document will form the basis for our Grant Agreement for the agency that succeeds in winning our grant.

8. September/October - We meet to prepare for the October Grant Hearing and to review our policies for the year and vote on any changes that are proposed. GSB Members are given a list of members to call to encourage attendance at the Grant Hearing. In addition, the reviewing teams for our two finalists offer to review the agencies’ presentations for the Grant Hearing.

10. October - Our members attend the annual Everychild Grant Hearing and answer Foundation members’ post-presentation questions about the agencies and the projects, after which our members vote on the year’s recipient by mail.

11. November - We meet to count the Everychild members’ votes and notify the winning agency and the members.

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II. Ethics Policy

The Everychild Foundation is committed to the highest ethical practices in its conduct in general and in its grantmaking procedures in particular. Accordingly, the Grant Screening Board has adopted the following policies to govern its consideration and resolution of members’ real and potential conflicts of interests as they may arise from time to time. In creating these policies, we have kept in mind the unique character and structure of our organization. Members of the Grant Screening Board are valuable to us for the expertise and experience they bring to our decision making. That expertise is often the result of relationships, personal or professional, that might amount to a real or perceived conflict of interest. We feel that these types of conflicts are inevitable, and that the relationships leading to them are desirable; accordingly, our goal is to manage them in a way that is acceptable to our membership and the nonprofit community at large. We do not want to create a policy that cuts us off from the very women who give our organization its strength and depth.

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The Everychild Foundation
Grant Screening Board Ethics Policy

1.  Disclosure

Our conflicts policy is premised on knowledge of each Grant Screening Board member’s relationships to agencies that may be applying for our annual grant. Accordingly, each Grant Screening Board member will disclose to the Grant Screening Board any relationship in which either:

(i) the member is in a position to influence policy at an applicant agency (for example, as a director, member of senior management, or consultant), or a family member (or other person with comparable influence) is in such a position. These "other persons" might include a spouse, a partner, a parent or child, a sibling, in-laws or step-families, or any other person (not necessarily limited to family) that the member thinks would influence her decision making; or

(ii) the member has a more informal or non-policy making relationship with the applicant agency, such as a volunteer or donor.

This disclosure will be made at least annually to the Grant Screening Board, with the timing of the disclosure to be determined by the chair. It is each member’s responsibility to advise the Grant Screening Board of any material changes that occur during the year. Everychild’s membership will be advised of any Grant Screening Board member’s relevant disclosed relationship with a finalist agency when summaries of the agencies’ proposals are circulated to the membership.

2.   Discussion

In order to promote free discussion of an applicant agency and its proposal, each member who has disclosed a relationship with an agency under paragraph (i) of section 1 above may participate in the discussion of the agency but, beginning with the document review stage, will be asked leave the room for a brief period during every subsequent discussion of the agency.

3.   Voting

Each Grant Screening Board member may vote on any issue affecting any applicant agency, including an agency with which she has a disclosed relationship.

4.   Ineligibility

An Everychild member is ineligible to serve on the Grant Screening Board if she or a member of her immediate family, including adult children:

(i) is a paid employee of an applicant agency, or

(ii) provides professional services to the agency, unless the amount of compensation is immaterial to her or her family’s income.

If either a member or her spouse receives indirect compensation from an applicant agency (for example, if the member or her spouse is an equity participant in an entity that provides paid services to an applicant agency), she remains eligible to serve on the Grant Screening Board. If the member becomes ineligible to serve during her term on the Grant Screening Board, she must resign.

5.   Policies Governing Grant Screening Board Leadership

(i) A member is ineligible to serve as vice chair or chair of the Grant Screening Board (a "leadership position") if she or her spouse would receive direct or indirect compensation from an applicant agency during the period of her term, provided, however, that this rule would not apply if such a payment, or the member’s share of such a payment, is insignificant (such as when the agency is one of many clients of a large firm of which the member is a part).

(ii) If a member serving in a leadership position also holds a position that influences policy at an applicant agency at any time during her term, she must resign that position if the agency has been invited to proceed after Letter of Inquiry review. This will mean the member and her agency must acknowledge at the time the member assumes a leadership position that either the agency could not apply for a grant during the period of her term or that the member would resign from her position with the agency during that period.

(iii) If a member’s spouse is in a key leadership position with an applicant agency (such as a board presidency or chair of a fundraising committee targeting our grant), the Grant Screening Board will consider whether the chair should resign if the agency proceeds to the document review stage of consideration for our grant.

6.  Compensation

No member shall accept direct or indirect compensation from any applicant agency from which a Letter of Inquiry has been accepted for consideration by the Grant Screening Board, nor shall she solicit directly or indirectly compensated work for future performance, while she is serving on the Grant Screening Board. No member who serves in a leadership position shall be directly or indirectly compensated by any finalist agency during the year following the expiration of her term.

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