Case Study 2 — RYCC Turns an Intimidating Checklist into a Plan
Composite, for teaching. RYCC and the Hartwell Family Foundation are illustrative.
The Situation
Denise Okafor opens the Hartwell Family Foundation's full-proposal guidelines and feels the familiar stomach-drop: Statement of Need, Program Description, Outcomes and Evaluation, Organizational Background, Budget and Budget Narrative, plus required attachments (IRS determination letter, board list, most recent audited financials). It looks like a wall of bureaucratic demands. This chapter's job is to turn that wall into a plan she understands.
Applying the Chapter
She maps the components onto the universal anatomy. Going down Hartwell's list: the Statement of Need is the "does it matter?" question (significance/needs); the Program Description is "can you do it?" (approach); Outcomes and Evaluation is "how will we know?" (evaluation), where her logic model belongs; Organizational Background is "are you the right team?" (capacity); Budget and Budget Narrative is "what cost / why each dollar?" (budget + justification). The attachments are funder-specific compliance items. Suddenly the wall is six familiar questions in Hartwell's clothing, plus a short list of documents to gather.
She sketches the logic model first. Inputs: \$50,000, two instructors, partner schools, donated laptops, curriculum. Activities: after-school coding at three schools, twice weekly, 30 weeks. Outputs: 90 students enrolled, ~5,400 contact-hours, 3 sites running. Outcomes: measurable coding-skill gains, increased interest in tech pathways, more students entering high-school tech tracks. Impact: a narrowing digital-skills gap and expanded youth opportunity — Hartwell's mission. The chain immediately tells her what each component must say, and binds them together: her Program Description describes the activities, her Outcomes section measures the outputs and outcomes, her Budget funds the inputs, and her Statement of Need is the flip side of the impact (the gap she will close).
She writes the one-sentence argument. "Fund this because the neighborhood's digital-skills gap is foreclosing kids' futures (it matters), our proven, community-rooted coding program can reach three times as many of them (we can solve it), and we have run it successfully here for years (we can deliver it)." It holds as one sentence — her proposal has a coherent spine before she has written a single section.
She lists the attachments and their owners. IRS letter (file), board list (she maintains it), audited financials (from the bookkeeper — she requests them today, since they live with someone else and could be a last-minute trap). The Chapter 4 process lesson returns: gather the slow, other-people's documents early.
The Transformation
In under an hour, Denise has converted an intimidating six-part checklist plus attachments into: a mapped outline (each part a question she knows how to answer), a logic model that binds the parts together, a one-sentence argument, and a dated plan to collect her attachments. She has not written the proposal yet, but she now has its skeleton and its coherence built in — which means when she drafts each component in Part II, she will be fleshing out a sound structure rather than assembling parts and hoping they fit.
Discussion Questions
- Mapping Hartwell's labels onto the universal anatomy "dissolved the intimidation." Why does understanding the shared questions beneath funder-specific labels make any new application format less daunting?
- Denise built her logic model before drafting components. How does that order help her avoid the coherence problems Dr. Hernandez had to fix after drafting (Case Study 1)?
- The audited financials "live with someone else." Connect this to Chapter 4's process lessons — why flag it now rather than at submission?