Heritage coordinator details next steps for Natural and Cultural Heritage Grant recipients

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Heritage coordinator Kaitlin Stanley, who guides Douglas County's Heritage Conservation Council, speaks during a Douglas County Commission work session April 6, 2022. The council recently wrapped up the application review process for its 2022 Natural and Cultural Heritage Grant program.

Recipients of the Douglas County Heritage Conservation Council’s Natural and Cultural Heritage Grant will soon be able to get to work on a number of projects, from prairie restoration efforts to hosting cultural celebrations in the community.

The Douglas County Commission officially approved the council’s list of nine grant recommendations at its April 20 meeting. But prior to that, the council had been deliberating since the March 10 application deadline.

This year, those deliberations were especially involved. Heritage coordinator Kaitlin Stanley said the council received 25 applications this year, two and a half times more than the rough average of 10 applications the council usually gets. That extended to an even wider gap between the amount of funding on offer — $200,000 — and the roughly $750,000 in requests.

But Stanley said the council did a great job working through the process despite the larger-than-usual work load. The council had to read about 600 pages of application materials in just a week, she said, a heavy load for a group composed entirely of volunteers.

In her role, which she began back in January, Stanley actually doesn’t have any involvement with the process of evaluating or selecting grant recipients. Instead, she works with applicants directly both during and after the process to help them produce stronger applications and later put their grant proposals into action.

“I don’t get to have an opinion, which is probably really good because after meeting all of the applicants you want everyone to win, you know?” Stanley told the Journal-World Monday. “You’re spending time with them on their applications, and you feel compelled that everybody should receive funding.”

But that’s a tall ask when there’s nearly a quarter less funding to distribute than what’s been requested. With that in mind, the council set some criteria that helped narrow the field in a more intentional way, Stanley said; projects gained priority if they were sustainable and amplified underrepresented stories.

Those considerations also helped bring in some strong new applicants. One of them was a collaboration between the Ballard Community Center, which provides affordable early education services, and Somos Lawrence, a community initiative advocating for effective and culturally informed grassroots outreach to the non-English speaking residents of Douglas County. Their grant award of $5,000 will fund two community celebrations stemming from traditional festivities in Mexico and Central America — Day of the Dead, a collective ritual of remembrance tied to the harvest, and Day of Spring, a celebration of the planting season.

“That really challenged the Heritage Council to see heritage from a different lens,” Stanley said. “I think they really appreciated that, because it brought this idea that heritage isn’t only what happened in the past, but it’s what we’re making it right now.”

Only one project each year is awarded anything higher than $40,000; this time, it was a collaboration between various conservation organizations such as the Grassland Heritage Foundation and Native Lands LLC, along with Haskell Indian Nations University and the Lawrence Parks and Recreation Department, to restore a native landscape within Prairie Park.

Another project, this one from Ascending Stars Consulting, will document letters from the first students to attend the Haskell Institute in the 19th century. That particular project was granted $35,000, a little less than half the amount requested in its application, and Stanley said that’s intended just to help Ascending Stars get its work off the ground.

Stanley said even partial funding — for this project and others like it, with a scope larger than the council is capable of funding all at once — can hopefully open the door for an organization to pursue alternative funding sources in the future, or return to the council for another application process next year. In general, she said helping applicants become more informed about where else they can look for financial assistance will be an important task for future grant application cycles.

“That’s something we’re still trying to do, make sure that we’re helping people not just view us as a source of funding,” Stanley said. “Because $200,000 goes really quickly. That’s something we’ll be working on in the coming years, helping people that come through our grant (process) to find external sources of funding that aren’t necessarily in Douglas County, but regional, national opportunities.”

To that end, Stanley said the council is hoping to eventually build a resource library that can help with pointing applicants toward those external funding sources. That will likely become an important tool if the number of grant applications received moving forward trends as high as this year.

If that does end up being the case, Stanley said there’s a chance the council will need to seek approval for some more sweeping changes — to offer more than just $200,000 per year in grant dollars, for one example, and potentially to increase the council’s size from seven members. Boosting the council’s size is an idea current council members have already brought up to county leaders recently, at an April 6 Douglas County Commission work session.

With the application process now in the rear view, the next step is waiting for grant recipients to receive and fill out their grant contracts. Five of the nine projects weren’t granted the full amount they requested, so those contracts will also include some change-of-scope amendments.

From there, grantees will engage in quarterly project reporting. Stanley said she also plans to bring the group together roughly as often, where they can connect and share knowledge that might help their peers. They’ll make up something of a “grantee cohort,” she said.

Accounting for the remaining paperwork and the time it takes for the county to actually send out money, Stanley said she’d guess most projects are off the ground by early summer. Some likely will be sooner than others, such as a project to repair the roof of the Clinton Store, a historic building on the other side of Clinton Lake in rural Douglas County.

“All of these projects, even the ones that applied and didn’t receive funding, we hope that they happen in some capacity,” Stanley said.

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