Green Team Mini-Grants Program

In different years – yes. If someone from your school applied for a grant last year, you can apply again for a grant this year. Note that KEEP will give a higher priority to applications from schools that haven’t received much (or any) funding from KEEP before.

If you apply for a grant in the fall and are denied, you may try again in the spring. KEEP will be happy to give you suggestions on how to improve your grant application. KEEP will not fund multiple grants for the same school during the same school year.

The grants are only for projects that reduce the school’s carbon footprint, BUT there are a lot of ways to connect projects to a school’s carbon footprint. Be creative! A school garden doesn’t decrease your school’s carbon footprint as directly as turning off the lights does, but it can still make a difference. For example, will you eat the food you grow in the garden? Will you eat the food grown in the garden instead of food grown somewhere else and trucked in? What is the carbon footprint of that transportation which you will avoid?

KEEP can help you brainstorm ideas, but don’t forget that you’ll need to defend your arguments with CO2 emissions calculations, so if it’s something completely unrelated (e.g. building bat houses), it might be better to look for other sources of funding or think of a different project to do for the Mini-Grant.

This will be a very good topic to research before you write your grant application! The short answer is that it’s how much carbon dioxide (or other greenhouse gases like methane) go into the atmosphere because of your school. This can include direct CO2 emissions (like burning natural gas to heat your school) or indirect CO2 emissions (from the power plant that gives your school electricity or parents driving students to school) or even the manufacturing of things that your school uses.

Check out https://www.epa.gov/climateleadership/scope-1-and-scope-2-inventory-guidance for more information on the types of carbon emissions an organization can produce. KEEP is most interested in projects that reduce scope 1 emissions, then scope 2, and lastly scope 3 (upstream or downstream).

Not completely alone! All projects need at least one adult advisor (someone either at the school or part of a registered nonprofit you’re working with) to accept and manage the money. All projects need at least three students working together to apply (But the students don’t need to be in the same grade level, class, club, or any other official organization. You only need to decide to work together on this).

It depends. KEEP would like at least some data and conclusions about the project by the final report due date, but this doesn’t have to be completely “finished” data (for example, “300 carrot seedlings sprouted and we have 27 students who have volunteered to water them over the summer, but they won’t be fully grown and ready to eat in the cafeteria until next fall.”).  However, KEEP is concerned about projects that won’t even be started until the summer or next fall. In that case, KEEP recommends applying for the Mini-Grant the following fall, so there’s time to do the project during the same school year as you apply. If your school administration says that part of the project has to be done during the summer (for example installing new motion sensor switches), please talk to KEEP and we’ll decide on a case-by-case basis.

If your project requires doing something that someone in your school could say “No” to. Specifically:

1. If you want to turn off computers at night, you need a letter of support from your school’s IT person that it’s okay for the computers to be fully off at night instead of asleep and waiting for updates.
2. If you want to serve food you’ve grown at your school, you need a letter of support from your school nutrition staff saying that they are willing to serve it.  (Serving homegrown food in the cafeteria is legal, but not all cafeteria staff may be aware of that or comfortable with it. If you get objections, KEEP staff have resources that may help.)
3. If you want to install something (LED bulbs, motion sensors switches, etc.), you need a letter of support from your school’s facilities staff that they approve the installation.  This should state whether facilities staff will do the installation themselves, or whether someone will need to be hired to do the installation, and if so, what that will cost and whether or not it will be paid for through Mini-Grant funds or some other funding source (in which case tell us what that is).
4. If you have another idea and you’re unsure if it requires a letter of support, either ask KEEP, or just include the letter – it’s always better to have extra support than not enough support!

No. This is a grant for students. If none of the students in your group have email addresses that can accept outside emails, your teacher/advisor can do the emailing back and forth with KEEP. If necessary, your teacher/advisor can take what you’ve written and copy and paste it into the grant application form. And your teacher/advisor can always give you help and support as you figure out what to write (and so can KEEP!). But the actual text of the grant application should be written by students.

KEEP will decide this on a case-by-case basis. If you’re only a very small amount over, KEEP will still consider your grant application, but we may put it at a lower priority depending on how far it is over. If you need a lot more than $700 to do your project, KEEP will either ask you to rewrite your project to be within our budget, or suggest that you look for a different grant to apply for.

No. The project has to benefit one or more schools, and the students involved have to be WI K-12 students, but it’s okay if the group got together through a club/organization/program outside of school, and it’s okay to either pick one school to support with your Mini-Grant project or support several schools at the same time. If you want to do a really complicated project involving lots of schools, please talk to KEEP first.

Possibly. Please talk to KEEP to discuss the details and check whether we have money available.

Yes and no. KEEP cannot support a project by just adding money to a large fundraising pile.  However, KEEP can help with specific, “line item” costs related to the project. These have to be specific items or payments that you can write in your budget.

For example, KEEP likes projects related to educating students, so you could develop a project to put up a screen in your school to show how much electricity your solar panels are generating at a given moment. KEEP could help pay for the screen, the installation, and the software programming (plus we have free lessons and training for teachers so they can use this information in their classes!), but we aren’t able to put $700 towards a $60,000 solar array installation bill.

Yes, if you have a project advisor or someone else with available money who is comfortable doing so. However, we recommend that you wait to at least find out whether the project is approved or not, or you might end up not being able to be reimbursed if the project isn’t approved.

Check out these example Mini-Grant applications from previous student groups! Note that student information has been removed and the application questions have changed slightly since these applications.

• Reusable Dishes
• Locally Grown Food