Hello! My name is Adam Graubart and I am a senior preparing to graduate in less than one month(!!!). I major in Human Services & Social Justice, and I minor in Judaic Studies. After graduation, I will join the rabbinical program at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. As an aspiring faith leader, I intend to use my knowledge of the nonprofit sector to effectively lead, serve, and organize a congregation to advocate for social justice causes.
I am a member of Team 4, which oversees our evaluation process. Once our application deadline closed, Chris, Elena, and I separately assessed all 21 grant applications in 5 days, using the rubric we created. Then, we convened to determine composite scores and select the top seven contenders for the rest of the foundation to consider.
With so many applications from which to choose, I felt uncertain that our team would narrow the pool to a top seven. However, I appreciated that we designed a rubric ahead of time that offered very concrete scoring criteria. For instance, our rubric awarded one point if an organization’s goals and objective were 1) specific, 2) measureable, 3) attainable, and 4) time-bound. As I reviewed different grant applications, I highlighted the parts of the grant that met these criteria, and in the absence of evidence, I felt responsible for deducting points accordingly. Before incorporating my personal intuition into the scoring, I allowed assessed the content of each application within a more standardized framework. In this manner, I felt that I was not favoring an organization based on how excited I felt about their project.
Even our more subjective measures provided a nuanced description of what constituted a full score, holding me accountable to justify my rankings.
For instance, we thought very diligently about how to define “capacity” in our rubric. We wanted to equally consider the value of a program director who wrote a dissertation on immigration issues and a program director who is a refugee with 20 years of experience working with immigration services. Thus, we defined capacity as the following: “The organization’s staff seem exceptionally capable of possessing the expertise and capacity to carry out this project.” In considering what I need to vindicate my scoring, I cited the staff’s educational attainment, their direct connection with the immigrant experience, awards/accolades, the number of responsibilities on each staff member’s caseload (i.e. potential for burnout), client testimonials, and/or an organization’s net revenue on the 990 form (i.e. financial solvency). In this way, the rubric description proved ambiguous enough to allow me to consider many different forms of expertise, yet the caveat of being able to “exceptionally carry out the project” meant that I needed to pull sufficient evidence from throughout the application to legitimize my score.
To our surprise, Chris, Elena, and I mostly agreed about our rankings. In fact, when we considered the applications in order of mean score, we our top five contenders matched, making it easy to select them for the next round of consideration. For the six and seventh slots, we disagreed a bit about which applications excited us the most as a team. To resolve this dispute, we thought about which projects of three or four borderline candidates best fit our mission. We also discussed which of these proposals expressed the most strategic use of our funding. One organization, for instance, suggested that it would use our grant funds as leverage in obtaining a much larger government grant.
After hours of reading, ranking, and deliberation, we presented our top seven in alphabetical orders to the class, avoiding the bias of announcing our personal favorites. From these options, the class decided on a top 4, and as we come closer to picking a single beneficiary, I hope to continue to rely on our rubric as a guide, making an altogether subjective process slightly more concrete.
-Adam