Building a Budget that Works | BEW Grant Workshop #4 | May 30, 2023

Transcript

just all right everyone thank you so much for joining us for this black empowerment Works Grant Workshop number four all around building a budget that works this Workshop is made possible by the United Way of Greater Cincinnati table and bi3 we hope that you've had the ability to join some of our prior workshops my name is Janae Bradley I'm the director of the black LED social change team joining me here today who are going to be running point in the background for me are Jeremiah penabaker and will Simpson the three of us round out your black empowerment Works team so if you ever call or send an email or schedule a question session you will be talking to one of the three of us Beyond hearing from me today I'm so excited that you'll get to hear from our special guest vashtai Rutledge vashtai is the executive director of Madisonville education and Assistance Center also known as meek and is one of the servant leaders of table but before we dive in let me tell you about what we'll be covering today first we'll give a high level overview of black empowerment Works especially for folks but this might be your first BW session that you're attending we'll then get into the meat and potatoes of today's session which is financial considerations when creating a budget we'll talk about topics such as considering your full scope of work you're existing and needed resources the types of funds that you should consider and accounting for human capital I want to note that the information that is going to be presented while uh it's in the framework of black empowerment work should be generally applicable to all of your Grant finding and budget creating needs so there may be a couple of things that may not be specific to Black empowerment works but we'll be sure to call that out so let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about BW it's like United Way we're focused on Building Solutions and aligning systems to help our families and our communities Thrive we describe this work as this Iceberg where often you see the symptoms at the top so those immediate needs that are emerging but below that water line there all of these root causes for us at United Way we're not only about addressing the symptoms but also getting to the root causes understanding what policies practices resources relationships mental models and structures of power get in the way as we're doing this work externally it's also important for us to take a reflection internally and say how can we transform our own systems of power or policies or how resources flow thus was the birth of our black empowerment works and black LED social change work we say that black LED social change exists because we are compelled to hold spaces and provide resources to imagine and bring to life unencumbered self-determined black Futures so in our work of black empowerment Works we're aiming to support work that does just this and while we refer to Black empowerment Works often as a grant to us it's so much more than that one portion is that we engage community members as decision makers so we at the same time that we're accepting these applications for Grants we're also accepting applications for community members to decide where this investment goes we want to contribute to this ecosystem of support for black social change makers that goes beyond the provision of dollars it's about Connections to other resources space and Beyond and all of this is to provide that resource to community-based Black LED work that often gets left out of other Grant processes that are looking to build Solutions and transform systems for our grant program there are a couple of eligibility requirements what makes us a little different is that it's open to non-profits for-profit social Enterprises Community coalitions individuals so long as they meet these five requirements the first is geographic Focus so the work must take place within the United Way of Greater Cincinnati nine County region which includes Hamilton Butler sorry Hamilton Claremont and brown counties in Ohio Boone Kenton Campbell and Grant counties in Kentucky Dearborn and Ohio counties in Indiana black leadership and labor is defined as the majority of those empowered to make decisions on behalf of your group or organization identify as black for organizations that number is 60 percent of the leadership team and if you have a board it's 50 of the board of directors we Define Grassroots and community-based as work where people who are most connected to the issue or the opportunity that you're addressing have a hand in shaping it uh and and how it flows so we're looking for folks that have lived experience director and direct with that and oftentimes these are organizations there are smaller in operation Community benefit is one that we consistently lift up which we Define as the benefit of the work extends Beyond a benefit provided to any individual group or business so if you are a for-profit organization applying what must be true is that there is a broader Community benefit provided to folks Beyond you and your stakeholders and finally and also bolded is actionable so we're looking to invest in work that has the ability to produce measurable outcomes within the first year of our grant cycle our cycle runs September 2023 to September 2024 so the work has to be far enough along in development or execution to create those measurable results by then we have a policy only one application per year through an organization or a body of work the focus areas that we invest in are pretty broad you'll see here I won't step through all of them but they range from quality Early Child Care and education to birth Equity to systems change and financial empowerment your work must touch at least one of these Focus areas though oftentimes people may address multiple and that's okay elements of a strong application you'll hear us talk about this throughout this session today but we Define elements of a strong application as these five primary things one is that the proposed work is clear defined and easy to understand recognizing that community members will be reviewing your application I'm going to skip to impact so the work is able to produce meaningful and measurable results and eligibility the work is strongly aligned to one of our Focus areas there are two elements of a strong application that will be specifically addressing today and those are feasibility and capacity so feasibility we Define it as the budget and the timeline are clear and feasible so they seem realistic and capacity connected to feasibility is all about showing that with funding and supports there's sufficient capacity to carry out the work as proposed so that's why we bolded these two because the budget directly ties to both of them before I pass it over to Vash time I'm going to talk about a couple of things on that budget work from a United Way standpoint question number six in the black empowerment Works application is the one that specifically asks about the budget and requests that you provide a simple budget for your work this slide is from our second Workshop where we did a deep dive of the application so if you did not attend that Workshop we recommend that you go back and look at that recording where we step through the bulk of the questions in more detail but today we'll focus just on this simple budget question some recommendations that we provided included when you're answering this question consider what it will take to bring your proposed work to life request what you need and ensure that the budget is clear include other funding if applicable so if there are other resources that you have to bring this work to life be sure to include those provide a budget for the scope of work you're looking to have funded so if you're looking to have just a program funded provide a budget for that program if you're looking to really fund some general work of your organization that budget should probably be more General and finally feel free to use the template that we've provided when you go into EC impact and you look in the resources section you'll find that budget template questions seven and eight in the application also touch on the budget where it asks what resources Beyond funding you already have and what others you might still need important couple of notes eligible uses of bew funds we look to really structure this close to a general operating Grant meaning you can ask for a lot of different things or use these Grant funds for a lot of different uses which include staff costs Equipment Technology stipends or assistance to individuals some indirect costs including utilities professional fees travel in a very limited circumstance and some other miscellaneous costs I stepped through a lot of that quickly and will give you an opportunity if you have questions to ask them in the chat but I really want to now turn it over to vashtai Rutledge what I think is really powerful powerful about vashtai is she's operating a small organization so she is going to provide you a perspective as someone that navigates through this and has to figure out budgets in her day-to-day work welcome vashtag and you're on mute I am good afternoon everyone you would think I would remember that one little important thing but I think it happens to the best of us so thank you all for for joining for joining us this afternoon to talk about building a budget that works it's it's funny right before I um join you all I was meeting with the accountant that I work with for Meek which is Madison law education and Assistance Center where I am the executive director and I was like am I going to tell her I'm about to do a budget Workshop because she would be like hold on you might need backup um right that what I hope to be able to provide for you is I think what is important to have as someone in the leadership of an organization who is not a financial expert so I still need the expertise um at times of someone who this is what they do and live and breathe but there I'm a I know enough I have a general um knowledge well enough to build a budget to be able to apply for Grants to have those grants applications approved and bring money into our organization and so hopefully what I can do uh is share some of that knowledge with you all and help you prepare not only for your black empowerment Works grants but for grants that you may apply for in the future if you have questions that you did not send ahead of time please feel free to put those in the chat and the UW team can can kind of feed those to me and um if you did send some questions beforehand I hope that the content that I share today will answer a lot of those questions and I'll be double checking those questions throughout the time to make sure I cover the things that I wanted to share with you all so I have um a a PowerPoint I want to share with you also I'm going to share my screen so you all can actually see see the work and hold on where to go all the windows when you have 100 windows open let's see my screen is not sharing so give me one second but it shouldn't be there we go this is so good for some reason hopefully it got a little technical issue here with the zoom where I'm not seeing um my screen so I'm gonna try and work through that with the general information and then I'll work on the back end with the UW team to see if I can get this pulled up so okay um Janae really quickly I'm just going to share this with you to see if you can get this this screen share for me because I cannot um for some reason when I this I have screen share ability but for some reason it is not coming up apology keeping up it is it like today after a long weekend I won't share so um in the meantime I'm still going to go ahead and get started because we got we don't have a lot of time we got a lot to talk about so one of the things is I think before you start working on a budget sometimes when we're like I have this great idea I want to get this work done and there's a grant available they say you know you can apply for up to fifty thousand dollars so I'm gonna apply for fifty thousand dollars put the brakes on because before you start to think about your budget and what it is that you're trying to accomplish the first thing you have to ask yourself is what is it that you're doing so you really do have to take the time and write down your scope of work what is it that you are trying to accomplish and then be specific so when you're thinking about you're working like we're going to run a after-school program for you know for kids grades three to five that's the big picture of what you're trying to do but then you want to think about and what does that mean we're going to run a summer camp that goes on field trips that provides you know pool passes for the summer that um you know will you need a driver so you have to start to actually work through the details of what it is that your work encompasses what is the full scope so as your name was saying in when she in the introduction is are you trying to fund your organization or are you funding a specific project within your scope of work and whichever one of those it is you want to make sure that you are writing it all down and being very clear about what it is that you are trying to accomplish and I think that is your first your first step before you even get to the place of thinking about what it is that you're going to do from like a financial standpoint and I just want to really highlight how important that is because it has such a big impact on the quality of the budget that you're able to to build for those of you who are like I got my narrative I know what it is that I'm trying to accomplish um you will can then start to think about what are the questions that you need to answer and ask yourself in order to build a budget that is going to work and meet the the guidelines of your Grant so here I just did a little trick for um for getting the screen share so I'm going to be able to um share this with you all now can you all see if anybody can say let me know we can see it perfect perfect well I kept tweaking kept trying to tweak in the background to see if I could could get it to share so right so what is the scope of work and then get specific drill down as far down as you can into your programming your work so that you can really understand what are the things you're going to need to ask for money for then I think there's some key questions you can ask yourself it's kind of like a cheat sheet uh let me think about what I need to know before I start to build this budget what do you need so especially if you're building something from the ground up and right now and maybe it's just you or their salary and staff considerations do you that you need to take into account are you going to have to hire people in order to do this work how much are you going to pay them what equipment do you need are you going to need some technology are you going to need laptops or tablets in order to get some of the work done are you going to need materials that go to participants what are the supplies you're going to have to buy and then as you're starting to go through the different items that you need for your budget you're going to have to estimate the cost and making sure that all of those estimated costs are things that are actually necessary for your work to occur and what I mean by this is that particularly if you are building a budget for a project so not for your whole organization you want to make sure the things that are in those those lists as you're building this list it are the it's the items that are specific to that program or project if you have other pieces of the work that are for the organization but do not connect to that project maybe it's possible that they may roll into your indirect costs but if they're not out of line with that program you want to make sure that you're not just including things that go with other scopes of work and then is everything that you need in order to make this work happen and be successful is it reflected somewhere in the budget so it goes both ways it's when you look at your budget make sure that everything is there because particularly in the nonprofit sector I think we tend to ask for less than what we need and we have to get into the habit of being very clear and explicit about the true program cost of our work so you want to do your best job of indicating these are the things that we need in order for this work to happen if we're to happen successfully and so I'm not saying you know just throwing numbers out there to push the number up of what you're asking for but just really thinking about stop you know don't sell yourself short don't cut yourself too short either on the dollars you want to ask for what you need to get the work done so if you're starting something new from the ground one of the really challenging things is I don't how much does it cost so how are you going to estimate your costs one of them is that have you done some work like this previously so if you've run a different program even than the one that you're running now but you can look back and say well this one was a little different but I know that you know typically the higher you know part-time college students to run you know this other program we did we paid them this much an hour right and so it's like using some of your previous experience to lean back on and determine how much your costs are going to be the other thing is ask a friend and when I put friend in quotation marks like don't just ask any friend right like don't ask your neighbor but typically we know other people who are doing similar work right and I do this all the time you know I have a group of colleagues where when something comes up or we're thinking about something new and we don't know hey do you know how much you know I'm looking to hire a a bookkeeper or I'm looking to hire an assistant does any anybody else been looking for one recently how much are you paying in this position so it's really trying to find out from those who are doing the work currently or doing similar work currently how much their costs are and you know for the most part I think people are really generous with sharing that information so even if it's someone who you don't necessarily know really really well don't be afraid to reach out to your colleagues and peers and support each other on this journey and you know you know Pay It Forward do it for others and the other is research there is so much content out there I mean it's as simple as a Google search to just look at what you know how much typically does it cost to do you know to books how much does uh you want to buy um I'm just trying to think what you call those um the summer books right this is to prevent summer slides so you're going to buy a bunch of workbooks for kids go online and look let's see how much these are generally running and then you can do a little Maurice oh is there some place I can get them do I do you have your 501c3 can you get them you know is it something that you need that you can get without taxes that can cut down on your cost a little bit so really just you know putting a little bit of legwork in to estimate your cost because you want to get them as close to Accurate as possible because the more accurate your estimates are the more likely you are to ask for the right amount of money which will help you be able to implement your programming without having to go through additional potential fundraising and or a lot of budget revisions and I understand happen here real quick um and here we go so let's talk about what does it take to build build your budget so you're going to think about these different budget categories so you've kind of you've walked through this is what my this is my scope of work I have it clearly defined and I've bulleted out all of the different aspects of the work that I need to get done in order for this to be successful I've gone through I've done some research I understand that to hire you know part-time staff or one person this is how much I'm going to pay them if this is something that is going to be ongoing work and you may have to hire a full-time person or if you already have full-time staff and they're going to be putting part of their time towards this program you also want to include the cost of their benefits if you currently have a benefit package into that cost because that counts those are dollars that go into salaries and wages and benefits that you can't incorporate into a Grant application the other people you want to think about your the equipment the materials does the program program required travel so all of those different pieces are going to go into those different budget categories in order to get that full picture of what is it going to take to make this happen and so when you're thinking about this budget you're going to I think it would be really helpful for those of you who do not have a a budget right now for your full scope of work is to really start there and then start thinking about the grant proposal budget because the grant proposal budget is not necessarily the budget for your whole organization particularly if you are proposing just a particular project or program you want to be able to have a full picture of what your financial needs are but then you're going to pull out those details into your Grant proposal budget so that you understand these are the things I need for this specific program to be able to tell the story that aligns with the narrative in your work there so a little bit more about the budget narrative so I know in looking at the template there's not um a request for like a large narrative but I think it's really important that you all understand just ongoing um in the template there's there's a description line where you're going to put a brief description for what the line item is in that budget so if it's um if it's a staff person you're gonna you know put you know this lead you know Lead Teacher or kind of you know program administrator program manager right this person will manage the day-to-day operations of the work so just it doesn't have to be you know a long drawn out story but just in that description if you use the template you're just going to explain right if you have a technology cost and it says computers right and you're talking about okay we're going to buy we're gonna buy Google Chromebooks right for this group of of of of young people then you're going to put you know these Chromebooks will be used for and for whatever the purpose is within the scope of your work and partic in the in the template there's a place where it says you know what is the unit cost so you're that's where those cost estimates come in you've looked up what the cost of the individual Chromebook is and then how many of them will you need for your program oh we need 12 right and they're they right they cost 200 so I wish but right we need 12. they cost 200 so we need twenty four hundred dollars in order to meet this budget requirement right so the 2400 is the total the unit cost is 200 the quantity is 12 and they are for you know I don't know they're for technology access for our young people right so you're just going to the item how many what you need it for how it rolls into the program and then you want to make sure you understand how much time the people who are working on the grant are spending so if you do have um staff right now and this is a a program within a larger scope of work and that person is going to be spending all of their time there it's fairly cut and drive right 100 of their time is going to be allocated to this program so if it's the if it's you and you can say all of my time is going to this 40 hours a week but if it's actually going to be split 20 hours here 28 hours on another program or project you want to make sure that you show that here's this person's salary but I'm requesting this percentage because they're going to be spending 50 of their time on this work and so that's a way it's a really good way for you to be able to also track time and intention so if you're you're working budget is strong what you should be able to do is Monitor it over time particularly in the front end you are often estimating costs you're giving your best guess of what things are going to be down the road but things happen I think for you know a lot of us over the last year have seen our costs have gone up significantly because of inflation so the estimates that we may have put together this time last year they those are not 100 what we're spending now right or it's something like even the cost of gas to put in the car if your program includes a lot of travel and gas goes up you know 50 cents a gallon in the middle of the year then your costs are going to be different than what you estimated so then you may have to go back and look and say do we have enough money in order for this to happen it successfully are we going to run out of cash right where are we going to pull these dollars for maybe there's someplace else where you under spent and you're able to balance it but the only way you will know that is that when you create your budget that you have the best numbers possible and you're monitoring them over time particularly monthly at I think at minimum you want to be looking and saying where are we are we on track so when you're looking thinking of about your timeline for the length of time of your program looking at your budget and then being able to break it up sometimes you just have to say we don't know yet and so when you look at your your timeline you're saying this is a one-year program so we're just going to divide the cost evenly across the 12 months but which you may find out in the the pace of your work is that at different times of the year different costs start to fluctuate after you've kind of gotten into a rhythm then you will be able to make those adjustments right so we say oh yes typically we find that we always need um more staff support during the holiday season because it's a really busy time for us so our Personnel cost her up because people work overtime right so maybe you're slower in the summer but you have to build up to that so when you're first starting it really is about the the work you put in on the front end so that you can have your best estimate to get your budget ready on the back end when you can answer these questions I think this is when you're ready to really talk about um to really work through and build your budget how much funding do you need so it's really important to when you're thinking about applying for Grant dollars it is okay this is how much they say you can apply for but how much do you need individually and it may be that you need significantly more than what's available in the brand and if that's the case that's when you have to think about what are your additional places and spaces to do some fundraising activities and then how are you going to use the funds have you built a not only a budget narrative but a strong program narrative that explains how these funds are going to work um throughout the course of your programming and then when do you need the funding so that's another important thing right when you're thinking about looking at applying for our funding you want to make sure that the timeline that the the funder has also aligns with when you want to actually get your work off of the ground there are some funders in who have very short timelines where you know an application is due on June 1 they're reviewing them right away there's decisions made and maybe you can have dollars in your account by August one there are other funding strategies out there where it can literally take in almost a year right between the time when you first start the process of applying and and Outreach or whatever it is by the time you get through the whole decision making process and the check is actually cut right so you want to make sure that their timeline and your timeline are in alignment so that you are not trying to run a program with dollars that you haven't gotten yet because that's where you can find yourself it's like well the grant is coming but the bills come first so you want to make sure that when you need the funding and when the funding is available from that particular fund uh funder is in alignment but when you can answer those questions you really are ready to start to build your budget and then I want to walk you all through um the United Way template so I'm just going to switch screens real quick I'm going to stop this share and then so I can just go to my other tab real quick so we can walk through that something there we go for us I don't know it is my technology challenge day I'm like click the link the link does not open this is a thing I do have so if you want me to share my screen with the button yes why don't you show your screen because I just keep clicking and nothing keeps coming up so I'm like all right let me get that up and I'll have that up and shared for you in just one second oh here I have it up we just needed to speak it into exist yeah I just had to speak it up I had to say it and then it it it it popped back up because I'm like I've been looking at this thing well no no you share yours because the mine's doing the the same thing as it was doing before where it won't let me it's like all the screens are white out or white it out where it says share and it's just like blank pages so you share yours because something is blocking mine I do not mind at all why'd you do that I'm gonna just check the notes I'm going to check really quickly so there was a question about indirect costs which um Janae answered in the chat but I want to just kind of go back to so particularly one of the things that often goes into indirect costs particularly if you are thinking about you are applying for a program within a larger a larger organization and you all have um an office space right so you pay rent um if you have utilities that you pay those are things that you need them right the whole organization needs them they're not directly related to the cost specifically of that program but your staff need a place to sit right they need they need a desk or okay you're right they need a right you need your phone system and so those costs are in direct costs where you can include a percentage of those into the budget because those are a portion of those costs so one of the things that um I'm was working through today is that we were looking at the allocation of the cost across our organization because we have multiple programs so you're talking about the allocation of your human capital so the people who are doing the work if they are working on multiple things you have to kind of take a time take the time to sit back and reflect and say where do I spend the majority of my time is it on administrative tasks am I doing a lot of touching of the actual programmatic aspects of the work or right am I spending more time on fundraising and then really allocating your time in that way but you also can think about it similarly for indirect costs like utilities and your rent or right the cost of maintaining um your your Wi-Fi kind of like all of those things that the whole organization shares but a portion of it is necessary for every single program to actually actually get off the ground and then and um someone asked about where the budget template was but they're in the application system and you can we're going to look at that together now you do not have to use this template which is in the application but I found that the template was actually I think if you are new particularly if you are new to budgeting I think this is a nice template to use that will help you be able to break down your costs and then think through what you need in order to do your work um can you go switch over to the actual template for me Janae thank you so here you will see this is why I was like this is a great template because if you are just kind of getting used to building out a budget even when I said like think about the scope of work you could really once you start once you write down what your work is you can really use this template to as you're doing your cost estimates so like first category salary right Personnel who are the people how many of them am I going to need right and then you're going to put you can click there you put personnel and then item description so you're thinking who are you know it's going to be me for some of you who are teams of one and and we know how that is when you're first getting started right so you're the you're the everything you're the executive director you're the program manager right or maybe you are gonna bring on a part-time person so you can say I have multiple staff people and you can create that space to put another staff person and then you're going to think how much am I going to pay that person is it going to be hourly or is it a salary position and then you know for some of you like we're not at a place yet we're offering salaries and that's okay think about what you can what is the rate of pay that's actually going to get you someone in the position so one of the things I think is really important to think about right now is when it comes to Personnel costs that the numbers are up right there are lots and lots of companies businesses non-profits everybody's looking for staff and so and we know that people are looking for more flexibility and they're looking for better pay so when you are thinking about applying for a grant don't think to yourself oh I'm just going to try and keep the cost as low as possible because then maybe they'll get me the grant because they'll see we're doing all this work with just this little bit of money and then you can't actually fill the position because you didn't give yourself um enough financial support to actually be able to hire staff so if you are considering bringing on part-time full-time staff in order to do this work then you want to be very thoughtful about what is the pay rate or salary that you're going to need to pay in order to actually bring somebody on I just think it's it's it's so important it's really is it's going to be a challenge I think either way unless you already have somebody who said yes I'm coming on board that because the market is just so competitive right now but I think it's really important that you bake that concept into your process as you're preparing your budget and then after you kind of get through your personnel costs then you can start thinking about your either your equipment or your materials if you are running a program and you need need um you need books you need you know papers you need then start looking at what the cost of those will be so you need um you know maybe if it's a reading program and one of the things that you want to do is to be able to purchase you know grade level specific books for a group of students then you want to look and see how much the books cost right including the cost of like set up an invoice right so like you may not have the money to buy it yet but go you go on the website if it's available put in exactly what it is excuse me that you would say this is what we would want for the program put it in there see how much the cost is see how much the tax and the shipping is going to be right like get the full cost so with what does part of the grant request so when I say what is what do I mean by if it's going to be a part of the grant request is if this is something that is in within the scope of the work of what you're applying for black empowerment works is for so if part of the program is that you want to purchase books and they're not being donated and you need that money included in your cost you want to put it make sure you put it there and you want the best most the best number you can get to so if you have to do like a a um you know I guess like a dummy purchase then you can just go on the website or kind of you know go on Amazon compare prices I think sometimes you'll find and for us shopping around can save you money we oftentimes will try to shop local but a lot of times smaller local places can't don't have the same prices but if you pick up the phone and call we were making a very large purchase it was actually of books um we were making a very large purchase of books and the best cost we found was on Amazon but we actually wanted to see if there was a local bookstore that we could use instead so we picked up the phone and we called them and we said here's the deal your prices are here their prices are there but we're going to be buying you know 600. so is it worth your while to to price match for the quantity that we would be purchasing and they were like definitely so not only for them it's like okay we're partnering with a local nonprofit which a lot of time um businesses like to do including small businesses they can sometimes be your best Partners but it also provided an opportunity for us to work with a local small business right instead of just purchasing from Amazon so it's a relationship building process as well and so that is one of the ways where you can still meet your budget needs but also support your community and start to build relationships that you never know how fruitful they will turn now to be on the back end so you know use those kind of opportunities during your budgeting process to see how you can um you know how where there's opportunities to save or where there's opportunities to think out the box and do things a little bit differently the the other piece is I think one that is we talked I talked about a little bit is you know technology expenses so if you are going to have recurring costs something like a cell phone so if one of the aspects of this work requires someone to be out in the community a lot and they are traveling maybe um and you they need a cell phone for work that you all are going to purchase you're going to want to look at okay what's the cost the initial cost of the phone but then what are the ongoing monthly costs so that you're including in your request not just here's the 500 of the cost of the phone but the monthly recurring charges are going to be you know 75 a month so you're thinking about the full scope of cost of something like a cell phone the other piece are there some things you don't have to figure out yourself so if travel and mileage is something you have to think about like reimbursing staff for the cost of their for their travel is something that you're going to include especially if people are like if someone is using their own car if you don't have like a van or something like that and part of your program includes a lot of travel around the community then the there's a federal rate for our mileage and you can just say what's the mileage rate right now and then estimate about like oh we think that this this is going to require someone to drive I don't know 20 25 miles a day right four days a week and so then you can use that estimate and then multiply that by the mileage rate to estimate how much you would have to spend on mileage throughout the duration of the program so it's like it's not all on you to have to be like I don't know how much that costs right it's like how much do I just pay for all their gas nope There's an actual rate that is Quantified with you know mileage and is meant to include um depreciation and maintenance so that it is like this is a you know supposed to be this overall lovely number it's it it works out pretty good so at least it used to I haven't had a job where I've needed to use it for a long time but it typically covers the cost of gas and it should cover some basic like maintenance if you use it that way and right now it is and I think this is a switch on July one it think it gets updated um mid-year typically I believe in July 1 it may either go up or down based on the current price of gas but right now it's a it's 65 cents give or take like a nickel or something or not even that like a penny it's around 65 cents so that's the mileage rate if that's something you needed to include in your work then the other piece um around your you're building your budget so but this is really the process like you're just going to work through this line by line and you're going to give it your best estimate and then thank you Janae if you could scroll down so once you get to this this number right and so like right now we have eighteen thousand dollars here so then it's where's the money coming from and let's say just for practice that the maximum Grant from black empowerment Works was fifteen thousand so you would say black empowerment Works Grant you are actually requesting from United Way fifteen thousand dollars right that means you would have a difference of three thousand dollars where are those additional funds going to come from are you applying for another Grant did you apply for uh I think if they call them um summertime kids I think is that the GCF Grant first for summer since I've been kind of on like this summer campaign today is my daughter's first day of camp so I think that's why all of my my examples are kind of stuck on kids and summer camps so um maybe you apply for a summertime kids Grant and then that knocks off 750 right okay we're the additional funding we're we're the additional dollars gonna come from so if you have you know is there another Grant are you going to be doing fundraising maybe you have a fundraising event right and so you plan to have a um I don't know what's a good fundraising of it I don't know maybe you're gonna have a happy hour right you're gonna have a meet and greet happy hour event where people are gonna come out you're gonna do some split the pots and stuff like that right or maybe you're gonna do a um you you can think of you know things that are more in line with what you would want to do but let's say you're going to do a happy hour or a fundraiser event and then that's going to give you another oh it's gonna It's Gonna Knock It Right on now you're gonna get the rest of the money out of that which would be great but right like but that's the way you're gonna think about where's this income coming from so after you build your budget and you're like whoa I need more I need more than what's available from this grant then you have to start thinking about what are the other spaces and places for Revenue um and so that I because I'm like oh time is going really fast so we're kind of I want to wrap up with just a couple of things I have a couple examples that I wanted to share make accessible to you all so I will make sure that Janae can share the slides with you and um um because I included some links particularly they have some sample budgets in there so if you want to look at some different sample budgets you can look at those as well to say okay this one actually fits me and my work a little bit better and so because you have the choice to not use the template I also have um a link for volunteer hour estimate so someone said Can Personnel be in kind was a question Personnel can be inclined if people are volunteering so if you have folks who are uh oh wait no not in kind in your okay sorry I was thinking of that question incorrectly can Personnel be included in your income portion the not if they're working on the program if they're working in the program you should include them in the Personnel salaries component of the of the of the work so if they're touching this work even if it's just five percent of your time and you're saying but it's a critical five percent to actually making the program work maybe it's the person who does all of your um Communications and marketing materials and that person is core to like getting the word out about your program then include that five ten percent of their time that they're going to spend building that that piece of the of the work together in your budget because that's not in kind that is direct service to the program if it's if it's something like that if you have volunteers and you want to include that as a um account for that as a resource as far as in your income as a I was thinking of it in that way it's like an in-kind resource there is a calculator for how much volunteer time is worth so I put the link to that there that'll be shared in the slides for you all to see as well and then the last thing I shared was um the there's an executive director guide around um from tsne that if you sign up for like their um for like their web their newsletter or something I can't remember how I originally got it but they you can get their the chapter that's on budgeting and it was it's really I think it's really helpful as someone who came into a new role as an executive director in the place where I was like oh my gosh I have to be in charge of all of the budget it was just a really great kind of synopsis of all the questions you should be asking yourself and the things you should be preparing for as you take the take the Realms of of the budget and you're because it is um without the money you can't do the work and we know that that's just the reality of how it goes so I will make sure that you all have access to the side so you can so you can tap on those links and check them out as needed that is really all I have for you all today I hope that we got to most of the questions as far as um what you need in order to build your budget and how you can make it work there is one question that I want to make sure that I hit on before we go because I forgot about this one is someone had asked a question about like kind of budget adjustments so like in retrospect typically and this is something that varies kind of from funder to funder but typically there is an understanding that on the front end you're giving your best estimates and so that there is going to be some fluctuation in budget line items right that you're if it's a big change sometimes you may have to do a budget revision and you want to talk to the person who's funding the work with you um especially if it's a very Project Specific Grant it's like right if some things are General operating support where you can divide them across the organization as needed you don't necessarily have to do the same process but if you have like this line item is twenty thousand dollars this light item is five thousand and it actually ended up being 12 and 12 each in your concern reach out to your funder and then say this is how the the money is looking we need the same amount of money it just needs to go different places it does the budget need to be revised or you know can we just report it out on the back end so it's really about just open in communication so keeping communication with with your funders this is meant you should be in partnership with your funders not just kind of they give us the money and we go do the work but really trying to cultivate a relationship and hopefully that relationship can then turn into right more grants in the futures or renewals or kind of other opportunities so it's really just about keeping the open communication so that you know if there's a major change if you need to make a formal adjustment to your budget or if it's something you can just report out on the back end so I wanted to make sure that I hit on that with you all and so that is all I have and you know feel free to you know if there's additional questions afterwards that I can be helpful with feel free to reach out and I will make sure you all have those slides um to check out some of the resources that I that I had on my slides one more thing I'll add that was in a question that I didn't touch on the beginning was a question around do we have specific percentages that certain types of expenses can be do we have a limit around how much can be used for personnel and the answer to that is no what should be true when you're presenting your budget is that you have the capacity to carry out the work so if you're proposing a really elaborate program that requires a lot of Staff time and you apply against the staff time but your budget doesn't show any other materials then we would ask like okay you've got staff covered but what about the rest of it and maybe that's covered by another Grant just making sure that you have have that captured in our couple of minutes are there questions from the audience that we haven't addressed yet feel free to type those in the chat or to come off mute foreign ladies doing today doing well you that's good that's good yeah I had a quick question can you guys hear my ladies here we can hear you Brandon all right cool cool cool yes all right quick question so with this budget I was I wanted to like do things that might equivalate to you know more than what I might be able to do without the grant would that look like I don't know how to because when it says like is the funds secured a lot of the things that I do right now are just kind of out of pocket so it's kind of secured as much as I'm secure you know what I mean um so would it look would it not look right to have everything kind of not dependent on the grant but equal in with the amount of the grand is if you know what I mean because I have a program uh organization not just you know the grant would help to celebrate that um and I definitely could figure out you know different things that I I could do with the money but you know I'm not sure that you know what I mean I would be able to pocket you know forty thousand you know if your budget matches the amount that you're requesting for BW that's completely fine the only thing that that gets tricky for us is if the amount that you're requesting is less than the amount that you need or the amount that you need is significantly more than what we're able to cover and there isn't a documentation of how you'll cover the balance of that expense because then we'll get into a place of let's say your idea is a a 100 000 idea and we can provide you forty thousand dollars but you need the remaining sixty thousand dollars to get started then that makes it look like the work may not be far enough along in development to produce measurable results within the grant year so we have been the sole funder of a couple of different programs throughout the three years that we've operated and that's not a problem at all I was just thinking I was thinking about you know the piece just around you saying like it's secured as much as I'm secured and so in that when you're thinking about it from a grand perspective I think you can say like from a from a funny perspective it's not secured from outside funders and you can put in your application or in your narrative right I am self-funding this work and you want to build your budget on but I don't want to because right is that the point being that you don't want yourself on the work and so think about it like that and then also and and give yourself some room to say like I'm doing the best I can knowing that I'm taking this out of pocket but if I actually had resources some of these things would look a little bit different and then build the budget based off of kind of build the budget in a way that may be aspirational and that's perfectly fine because it's going to help you get your work to where you want it to go yeah that's great that's great you know we do we do a little bit of fundraising now um with you know when we can and then you know again it's definitely funding majority for me and my board as well you know people on my board they they dedicate they time they money and they all their resources too so I just want to be able to make sure that you know I describe my budget correctly because it's not it's not something that I again I know I got you know what I mean it's just basically okay cool I got an extra 500 here let me just put that in the non-profit because I know I want to do things related to that so I do appreciate you guys thank you for asking other questions from folks I know we're a couple of minutes over but we want to make sure you're getting all of the great knowledge and wisdom I have a question go for it hi hi this is uh Sierra thanks for all the information I do have a question about for-profit businesses um so for a program um I mean since we're you know for um for profit um the things that I've done in the past I've charged people for it um and the goal of what I'm using the grant for is to make it more affordable right for people and to have the grant cover the cost of what the program is um so that can charge less so if um where do we put I guess in our uh budget you know do we show like this is the ticket price this is what we're gonna use um you know so in terms of like paying myself so I'm going to use the money that I'm gathering from people doing this to pay myself and the grant budget is specifically for you know um covering the the cost of the program does that make sense like it does so for a for-profit if you're reducing the cost to other people just show in the budget what those costs are that their funds would have covered so if it is your time just list that it's covering your time and in the budget narrative you can explain that it typically costs this much we're providing a reduced cost and that's how it's reflected in the budget okay thank you you're welcome I have a question go for it okay my name is Carla Elliott so I'm just trying to get some clarity and putting together a budget for um staff I have I was told um by a person that writes grants that you shouldn't exceed 15 of your budget when putting together um costs to include personnel and I'm just trying to find out if that's true or not oh this is such a great question and I think vashtai will have a more nuanced answer in terms of black empowerment works like our grant is a little bit different than a standard Grant we do not have that specification that it should not exceed 15 but vashtag can you share a little bit more about your experiences outside of this and whether that number holds true for you yes that number does not hold true in the nonprofit space as in my personal experience I think it can look differently based off of the type of work you do and so there are times where a program may be really intensive on materials costs and like actual program costs and not as heavy on like Staffing and Personnel but it also depends on what ratio that you're able to manage from like a we have one person and they serve 500 people and all the costs are in materials versus something like so in my organization our Personnel costs are more than 50 percent of our annual budget because in many ways our people are the programs so our social worker if she's not doing her work the program ceases to exist there's not a lot of program costs and from a material and Equipment standpoint it's literally her working directly with neighbors who come in to engage in the program and so be as long as you can justify your costs then it doesn't have don't hold yourself to like an arbitrary percentage be and this is what what I mean around true program costs and how in many ways the sector the sector as a whole has done a disservice to itself because we've tried to look so lean we've tried to make it look like oh we can get by with so little and instead we've hurt not only our ability to do our work well but also the people who are doing the work like the folks on the ground who are the most important part of of the nonprofit system is those is those workers and so being able to account for them their time and what they need uh to be paid is critically important do not hold yourself to any type of arbitrary percentage like that I will say so we have the United Way raise dollars publicly and typically folks will ask us what your overhead cost and we have uh sort of it's a it's a legacy number of like 15 overhead or less means that you're uh like a highly effective organization where all of the money is going back into programs some funders or donors may look for that percentage but others won't so I get where the root of that knowledge is there's a long Legacy of the overhead myth that we're all just magical human beings that don't need to be paid for our time and we're doing it out of the kindness of our heart that I think as a sector we're trying to break okay thank you so much I really needed that um we have a question in the chat bash ties oh you already answered it so if y'all want to reach out uh to her outside of the session will also include her email address and the follow-up since she has offered it to this group I want to honor all of your time thank you so much for being with us here and thank you to vashti for sharing that amazing knowledge we will have the training for the recording of this session available on our website within the next couple of days you'll also be able to find the Train the recordings from all of our past sessions including the Deep dive into the application where we step through most of the questions designing delivering and evaluating programs and then that first session around Grant Readiness if you ever have questions there are many ways that you can reach out to us one we have our email address which is black Dash LED uwgc.org with the three of us monitoring it you can give us a call at 513-762-7233 if we don't answer please leave a voicemail and we'll get back to you in 24 hours or less you have the ability to request a question session or an unlimited number of 30-minute sessions dedicated just to you where we can step through your questions you'll find the link to register for that on our website at uwgc.orgbew apply and finally you all have the ability to request a preliminary application review if you complete your application at least two weeks prior to the deadline send us an email if you would like us to do a quick scan and lift up any immediate questions that we think reviewers would ask again thank you for your time please don't hesitate to reach out take care bye everyone