Four people who have a passion for inspiring young people will have a chance to receive a $2,500 grant from the Kalamazoo Community Foundation as part of a program of The Learning Network.
The Inspired Learning Grants are available to any educator, volunteer, support staff or paraprofessional working in a professional setting, including a school, a nonprofit or a private organization in Kalamazoo County who works with kids from birth to age 18.
There's no grant application to fill out, either. Instead, applicants are asked to upload a video that is 30 to 240 seconds (that's no more than 4 minutes) to The Learning Network Facebook contest page.
Each video should include the Inspired Learning program idea and how a grant would help bring it about.
Tell why the program is exciting to you personally; what impact it would have on young people in the community and why it inspires learning.
The video should also include what success for this program will look like: what are the educational outcomes.
See an example of what The Learning Network is looking for here.
The deadline for submissions is Nov. 25. Public voting on Facebook will determine the top 12 videos for final judging. Between Dec. 1 and Dec. 12 registered Facebook users will be able to vote for their favorite videos. The 12 videos that receive the most "likes" will advance to the panel judging phase. A panel of qualified judges from The Kalamazoo Community Foundation and the community will determine the four winners.
The contest organizers say there is no need to be a video star or to create anything with high production values. A winning application could be shot with a cell phone if the idea is inspiring enough.
"This is not about fancy video quality or editing," organizers say. "It's about your passion as an educator and the creativity of the presentation."
“Our local educators make a tremendous impact on the lives of youth in our community, and often they have innovative ideas for new programs that simply don’t fit existing budgets,” says Amy Slancik, community investment officer for TheLearning Network at the Kalamazoo Community Foundation. “This program is about helping bring those ideas to life so they can be tested on a small scale and we can all learn from them.”
Source: The Learning Network
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