What are Innovation Grants?

Although NRFC’s largest grants and greatest concentration of resources are devoted to these five initiatives and regions, NRFC also makes smaller innovation grants of $25,000 – 50,000 to other rural collaborative initiatives in established or newly identified regions of rural poverty.  Innovation grantees may be recognized for one or more of various reasons:

• They exemplify certain best practices or a uniquely compelling model in one or more of the areas of Strengthening Practice and Performance, Expanding Philanthropy, or Advancing Community-based Rural Policy
  
  
• They contribute in other ways to advancing or developing NRFC’s learning and evaluative framework for Rural Community Transformation – especially in the areas of wealth creation, family self-sufficiency and leadership transformation
  
  
• They provide an opportunity to explore complementary and potentially strategic new opportunities for deepening and/or broadening the approach to rural community transformation with a region in which NRFC is already at work
  
  
• They provide an opportunity for connecting the work, lessons and outcomes of various NRFC-funded initiatives – either within a region or across rural regions of poverty
  
  
• They provide a unique opportunity to explore an emerging strategy or multiple threads of complementary strategies for understanding rural community transformation within a region of rural poverty previously not funded by NRFC