This summer, as part of our annual grant writing workshops, GOCO embarked on a nine-stop listening tour around the state, soliciting input and capturing feedback. We invited people from all grant-eligible entities and were so pleased with turnout. We met with experienced grantees looking for the latest information, reconnected with previous applicants who hadn’t been through our grant process for a while, and greeted new faces eager to understand how GOCO funding works.

We really appreciate everyone who took the time to come chat with us and offer ideas, and we’re happy to share these key takeaways with you.

First, the good. We loved to hear how many of you have taken advantage of the technical assistance GOCO staff provides. We try really hard to deliver consistent, top-notch customer service. We travel the state every year to meet you where you are, and when we’re hunkered down in the office, we want to make sure we’re as accessible as possible to anyone with questions about our grant programs. Meet our staff and feel free to reach out to us at anytime with questions >>

We always try to do better. Just because we received positive feedback on our service to grantees and grant applicants doesn’t mean we can’t improve our processes. We heard great ideas during the tour, including providing better access to past successful applications (as examples to applicants for how to do their best work), offering more resources for local governments acting as fiscal agents for other organizations on projects, and better selling the benefits of peer reviewing grant applications. If you’re interested in helping review park, planning or school yard grant applications, email Madison at mbrannigan@goco.org and she’ll let you know of upcoming opportunities.

We’re working hard to implement many new ideas and accommodate feedback we received. And we’ll keep you posted as we roll changes out. Tell us what resources would be most valuable to you as a prospective, former, or current grantee >>

Grantees’ time is precious. Staff capacity was the biggest barrier for applying to GOCO for a grant, from writing the application to handling grant administration after funding has been awarded.

It was great to see local government reps eagerly offer support to their peers during these meetings when this issue was brought up. Hundreds of small towns have successfully gotten GOCO funding, including most recently Rocky Ford, La Junta, Crook, and Nucla. In many of the listening sessions, previously successful grantees offered their help to less experienced or first-time applicants. We’re looking forward to working together with all our grantees and applicants to break down this barrier. Let us know if you’re interested in mentoring grantees >>

We have some things to think about. Feedback on the timing of our grant cycles was a bit of a mixed bag. Last year, we moved our funding cycles to once a year (after an initial public outreach effort indicated that would suit schedules). We did this, in part, so we could award more grant dollars at once without forcing projects that just missed funding to devote more time to reapplying months later.

Now that we’re a year in, we wanted to know if that was working. We mostly heard ‘yes,’ but we also got some food for thought from grantees. On the open space side of things, for example, for some organizations two cycles per year worked better because they could act on urgent projects more readily. Tell us what you think about the new annual cycles >>

We also have to think about how to best serve unsuccessful applicants, which was another topic of discussion. We heard that detailed feedback is crucial for successful reapplication and are now thinking through how to best capture comments and ideas from our intensive staff and peer review processes.

Stay tuned. Listening tour attendees also expressed their hunger for more communications tools and resources, so we’re getting to work on those as well. Bear with us while we figure out how to address all the great feedback we received. We’ll certainly keep you in the loop, and we welcome additional feedback or questions at any time.