Blogs

In the Grants Administration department, we don’t often get out in the field much, so when Program Team Manager Candy Solovjovs invited me to accompany her on a site visit to Mt. Hood Community College, I jumped at the chance. The college had applied to MMT to help build a new Early Childhood Learning Center.

Today we join others in disseminating a report from Multnomah County’s Coalition of Communities of Color that addresses the relationships among foundations and communities of color in Oregon.

Meyer Memorial Trust’s website and web-based grant application system (GrantIS) will be unavailable during the evening of Monday, January 30th, 2012 beginning at approximately 7pm. This outage will last approximately 2 hours. During this time, MMT will be changing the IP addresses of these servers. Some customers may not be able to reach those services after the outage due to domain name data caching and record propagation delay.

Before even cracking a page, I was pretty sure I knew the answer to the question posed in the title of the new report, The Public Funding Crisis: Can Philanthropy Shoulder the Burden? Nevertheless, I thought it might contain some nuggets of wisdom. Turns out, it did–

MMT's Willametter River Initiative is hiring a communications/administrative assistant! We are looking for someone who enjoys a wide range of responsibilities, is tech-savvy, has top-notch organizational and communication skills, and loves to write.

With almost a year under my belt as a program officer, I thought it was about time to share a few thoughts on my experience thus far. Sitting on the other side of the fundraising table for so many years, foundations had always seemed a little mysterious and slightly scary to approach. Now that I work for one, I figure it's my responsibility to help folks peek behind the curtain and understand them a bit better.

Dear friends and colleagues,

After seven amazing years, I'll be leaving the Meyer Memorial Trust at the end of this year. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to work with each of you, whether on individual grant requests, the Oregon Small Schools Initiative, Affordable Housing Initiative, Our Oceans campaign or the Idea4Oregon's Leadership Development in Communities of Color.

Wait til you hear what my colleague Sally Yee and I got to do this summer and fall! Right in the middle of peak harvest season, we got to explore and visit some truly enterprising and engaging efforts to build strong community food systems in Oregon. As part of our jobs!

MMT's Technical Operations Manager Aaron Nelson writes about a loss to the world's technical community he finds greater than the loss of Steve Jobs. Yes, our geeks blog too!

We are often asked how many applications we receive, how many are approved, and what the awards were for.  So, to supplement Marie's monthly award announcements, I thought I'd provide some statistics on grants made through our Responsive Grants and Grassroots Grants programs in MMT's most recent fiscal year (April 1, 2010 through March 31, 2011).