Asmbly is looking into expand our revenue sources through grants this year. This is a G Drive link to a list of companies and organizations with a local presence that offer grants. We are wondering what connections our memebers might have to those organizations.
We don’t expect you to apply for the grants for us. Some of those applications requires a recommendation first, which we would love to get from our memebers. For more general applications, we are also hoping our members can send some kind words internally within their copmany to the team that evaluate applications.
If there are any questions, concerns and suggestions, just let us konw.
I would be cautious about ‘grants’ from large tech companies. I remember techshop making a deal with Samsung to bring in revenue by letter their employees do training a the techshop facility. The existing members were crowded out of many time slots. In another training program the students were not well supervised and trashed the machine shop. So watch out for ‘grants’ with stings attached.
Thanks @Hoosier! The leadership team and board are definitely extremely leery and cautious in those sorts of arrangements. We’ve actually kicked out members who used the space for businesses and had repeated violations of overuse with under cleaning/contributing. Availability of resources and conditions the space is left in is something we stay very sensitive to.
There are TONS of grants out there that don’t come with those sorts of strings (what you described sounds more like a sponsorship than a grant really). We’d love to tap into those and pool member connections to grease the wheels. Once we find some high probability grants to pursue, we’ll be hiring some pros to help ensure all the t’s are crossed and i’s dotted.