Have an idea for your community? Ready to further develop your concept and turn your idea into a reality?
Join us on Friday, September 9 from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. as we host a virtual workshop on how to develop a compelling concept paper around your idea. This workshop is provided through a partnership with the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) to assist communities in identifying and winning federal funding to support their projects.
You can register HERE.
The virtual workshop will be led by Nathan Willingham, Federal Grants Lead at CORI. Established in 2017, CORI is a nonprofit organization at the heart of a dynamic social enterprise focused on closing the rural opportunity gap. CORI partners with rural leaders across the country to build digital economies that support scalable entrepreneurship and lead to more tech jobs in rural America. CORI is committed to advancing economic prosperity in rural America through a comprehensive range of expertise, programs, and partnerships that ensure all Americans, regardless of geography, can participate in our 21st-century digital economy. As part of that work, CORI has created the Rural Innovation Network, a nationwide community of change agents and local leaders working to advance the economic future of small-town America.
Why should you attend?
This concept-writing workshop will provide advice and guidance for communities with ideas for digital entrepreneurship and innovation grants that may need additional help getting started. In addition to advice on writing a successful proposal, CORI will walk through the process of developing a simple but powerful tool for getting your project off the ground: the concept paper.
And it doesn’t stop there.
CORI will analyze these concept papers and give participants matchmaking advice on potential funding sources that could support these crucial efforts. Participants will better understand their project and the federal funding sources that might help fund it. Concept papers and matches to potential funding sources will help communities expand their pool of possible resources and begin developing a new proposal for funding support.
Are you ready to take action?
We have provided funding to assist five communities with detailed and strategic technical assistance. Communities will be selected based upon workshop participation, engagement, and quality of concept proposal developed during sessions. These communities will receive full-service proposal development support from CORI, enhancing participants’ capacity to manage the writing process, identify potential matching partners, and bring all the pieces together.
CORI’s technical assistance helps communities level-up their grant-writing skills. Instead of offering a grant writer to write the proposal for communities, CORI offers world-class technical assistance to help local grants teams to develop better proposals and write better grants.
CORI’s proposal development process has helped more than a dozen communities secure more than $17 million in grant funding by helping keep projects on track, work through project design, and provide advice, writing guides, and detailed reviews of grant proposal narratives and budgets. This technical assistance exponentially increases the quality of grant proposals and builds a durable capacity for developing future proposals.
Let’s work together
Ready to develop your concept? Register HERE for the September 9 workshop.