2022 South East District Funding Guidelines

Our Funding Priorities and Preferences

We’re committed to building a better world by investing our resources in bettering our communities, strengthening our economy and improving quality of life for individuals and families. We focus on distributing funding to local programs and initiatives that make a meaningful difference.

We’re specifically interested in supporting local initiatives and organizations dedicated to:

• enhancing financial and social well-being for vulnerable individuals, groups or communities.
• developing and/or maintaining community facilities and infrastructure required for community well-being.
• facilitating and building capacity for sustainable local economic development.
• enhancing and promoting environmental sustainability. 

When assessing applications, we prioritize organizations and initiatives that:

• address a compelling community need that does not duplicate existing service or facilities and demonstrates strong community support.
• demonstrate potential to achieve tangible impact on residents and communities.
• demonstrate the capacity to successfully carry out the proposed program or project
• may have limited access to other major sources of funding, but demonstrate efforts to carry out fundraising activities that contribute to project costs (we will not fund 100% of project expenses).
• have a membership with Affinity Credit Union.

Types of requests we consider include:

• capital requests for facilities/building purchase, construction or improvement projects.
• capital requests for equipment, furnishings or other capital items.
• program funding and one-time project funding requests (rather than ongoing operational costs)
• other projects at the discretion of the District Council.

Typically, we don’t consider requests for:

• private businesses or individuals.
• political or lobby groups.
• religious activities (with the exception of non-denominational activities with community-based purposes other than propagation of faith).
• endowments, contingency funds or long-term deficit funding/debt reduction (Note: we will consider retroactive capital requests for recent initiatives of less than one year; retroactive program or project expenses will not be considered).
• competitive sports teams, private schools or operations of service clubs.
• fundraising activities or events, including annual campaigns, ticket purchases and third party fundraising.
• conferences, meetings, field trips or tours.

Eligibility

You’re eligible to apply for funding if:

• you’re a not-for-profit, community-based voluntary organization, community service or not-for-profit co-operative, or mission-based enterprise.
• you’re a municipal, Indigenous or local educational institution/entity.
• your organization or initiative is located in and/or benefits the communities within our district.

Application Deadline and Processes

We accept applications any time of the year; however, we only make our funding decisions once a year. Our deadline is May 1, 2022. We’ll inform you of our funding decision six to eight weeks after the deadline has passed.

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