Annual Grants Program

Annual Grant Program Information

Request for Proposals OPEN NOW- October 2023

Current: April 4, 2023- March 31, 2024

Next grant cycle: April 2, 2024- March 31, 2025

History and Mission

The Idaho Legislature established the Idaho Children’s Trust Fund in 1985 to support efforts designed to prevent child abuse and neglect within the state. The Children’s Trust (ICTF) holds the vision that all Idaho children are valued, and that they grow up in a world where all children have the opportunity to thrive. The ICTF is dedicated to the prevention of child abuse and neglect through funding, educating, supporting and building awareness among community based organizations who share our mission.

Purpose

ICTF is more than a funder. We believe that by providing resources, training, and technical assistance to organizations that work directly with families, we lend continuity to the work you do. Our hands-on approach to funding is based on building relationships with and between grantees. These relationships act as the connective tissue to elevate the work we do into a coordinated movement. We rely heavily on collaboration and are tied to the national movement in a way that gives us knowledge of best practices in the prevention arena. ICTF’s funding mechanisms are strategically utilized to support our initiatives which are:

  • Stewards of Children- child sexual abuse prevention training
  • the Crying Plan -abusive head trauma prevention planning
  • Strengthening Families -a comprehensive strengths-based approach to prevention
  • HOPE Conquers ACES- Training on healing-engaged/trauma-informed care implementation and the power of positive experiences to prevent and mitigate Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES)

Successful applicants will be those who further ICTF’s mission directly or have the potential and desire to and thus will benefit from ICTF funding, resources, and knowledge in order to strengthen their work.

Core Considerations

  • Idaho’s children are the state’s greatest asset. Keeping them safe from abuse and neglect is our mission. Too often children suffer abuse and neglect with wide and far-reaching consequences that afflict for a lifetime.
  • Preventing abuse and neglect is critical to protecting Idaho’s children. Prevention efforts begin with shifting the focus from targeting family risks and deficits to building family strengths and resiliency.
  • Research shows that the best way to prevent child abuse is to educate, inform, support and partner with parents to help them build strong, healthy families. Therefore the majority of the funding dollars distributed by the ICTF are allocated to providers who embed effective prevention strategies into their parenting and early care and education programs to strengthen and support parents and families.
  • Child Neglect is a failure to meet children’s basic needs – whether the failure is the responsibility of parents, communities or society – and this void places children in harm’s way. Neglect represented 75% of all reported child abuse and neglect cases in 2014 (childtrends). Yet understanding it and its complexities pales compared to our understanding of other maltreatment. The ICTF is interested in projects that intentionally address neglect or look at one of the factors most frequently identified with it: history of trauma, poverty, maternal depression, substance abuse, devaluing challenges of child rearing.
  • Underserved populations are at even greater risk. Populations can be underserved for a variety of reasons. Rural communities, homeless families and communities of color are particularly vulnerable to scarce resources and a lack of community support. ICTF is dedicated to targeting these populations to increase community support and to ameliorate the negative effects of social isolation.

Annual Grants Program

Please be sure to read all application information and the application carefully.

The Idaho Children’s Trust Fund offers grant funding, within $1000-$7500 range, to programs that seek to prevent child abuse and neglect by increasing protective factors in order to strengthen families and promote well-being (See: Strengthening Families https://www.cssp.org/reform/strengtheningfamilies/about).

Timeline:

October 2, 2023, Annual Grant Application Packet Available

November 10, 2023, Annual Grant Applications due to ICTF

January 2023 Annual Grant Award Decisions

April 2, 2024, New Annual Grantee Project Start Date

May 2024 Annual Grantee Training

March 31, 2025, Project Period Ends

May 16, 2025, All Funds Paid Out

Eligible Organizations

  • Programs must be located in Idaho or provide services to residents of Idaho.
  • Grants are available to public or private non-profit and faith-based organizations, government agencies, (e.g. schools or health departments) or qualified individuals who provide community based educational or service programs designed to reduce or prevent child abuse and neglect.
  • Programs must have an Employer Identification Number (EIN) and an identified fiscal agent.
  • Programs must provide certificates of commercial general liability insurance and worker’s compensation insurance with their grant application.
  • Applicants must register for a Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) prior to applying for the grant and include it on the application. No grantee will receive an award without a UEI number. Click here if you do not have a UEI number.

Project Criteria

  • Proposed projects should be carefully designed with strategies for preventing or reducing the occurrence of child abuse or neglect based within the strength-based protective factors framework and using, whenever possible, evidence-based curriculum and evaluation tools. (https://www.cssp.org/reform/strengtheningfamilies/about)
  • Proposed projects must be designed using research based or best practice methods. Research must be cited in the grant application.
  • Proposed projects should be designed in a way that will help to solve challenges that are specific to the targeted population; e.g., services for Hispanic families should take into consideration the possibility of specific language barriers and cultural issues.
  • Project staff must be willing to collect, maintain and report various demographic and programmatic data about their services.
  • Project staff must be willing to partner with participant parents and clients to increase participant involvement, satisfaction and leadership within their organization.
  • Project must include a logic model detailing how strategies activate protective factors and how change is measured (see examples below).
  • Project must have administrative capacity to turn in reimbursement requests within 60 days of reimbursable activity. Failure to do so could result in a denied reimbursement.
  • A final report will be required.
  • Direct treatment programs can not be funded due to the wording of our statute.
  • NEW EVALUATION REQUIREMENT: All grantees of the Idaho Children’s Trust Fund will be required to use the Protective Factor Survey if it’s appropriate to do so. What is the Protective Factor Survey? The PFS2 is a survey that determines the strength of the five protective factors (*Parental Resilience*Social Connections*Knowledge of Parenting and Child Development*Concrete Supports in Times of Need*Social and Emotional Competence of Children*) within a family both before and after a programmatic intervention to assess for changes that would reflect the effectiveness of the intervention. Why use the protective factor survey? The PFS2 is the only tool that determines if the programs we are implementing to help families actually increase the protective factors to strengthen families and prevent child abuse and neglect. In the end, we want to make sure the programs we fund are helping families. Additionally, if all of the organizations we fund use the same tool, it is easier for us to see the impact we are making across programs. What do we mean by “appropriate” to do so? The PFS2 will only be required if the program being funded is of the length and duration that a difference in one or more protective factors could be predicted. Some programs where the actual intervention or interaction with the participants is of a short duration would not work with this evaluation tool. For example, the child sexual abuse prevention training, Stewards of Children, is two-hour training with its own evaluation tool. Since the intervention is only two hours long, for one time, the PFS2 would not be able to accurately determine a change in protective factor levels in a participant’s life. A copy of the Protective Factor Survey (PFS2) will be linked to our website below this document. Please contact Kim with any questions as to whether your program is PFS2 appropriate.

How to Apply

Evaluation

  • Applications will be scored by Grants Manager and sent to the Idaho Children’s Trust Fund board for scoring, evaluation, and award determination.

Geographic Distribution

  • ICTF assures equal opportunity for community based child abuse and neglect prevention programs in all geographic regions of the state.
  • Programs will be asked to identify where services will be provided; within specific counties, cities, tribal areas, or statewide.

Logic Model Help

Logic model definitions and several examples of each are given for your use. Protective Factor explanation follows.

Population Served: Description of the participants

Examples:

  • Spanish speaking parents with children birth to six in Idaho, Region 3
  • Early Care and Education providers in Idaho, Region 7
  • Families lacking safe, affordable housing

Population Needs to be Addressed by Services: Needs that this program intends to address

Examples:

  • Parents need to know stages of child development
  • Fathers need positive discipline tools
  • Parents report being unable to navigate systems such as schools, Head Start, WIC, TANF etc.

Services: What services will you provide?

Examples:

  • Parenting classes offered weekly for six weeks
  • Strengthening Families materials and Modules 1-3 training
  • Weekly parent-child labs in a developmentally appropriate classroom

Protective Factors: Protective factors are the strengths and resources that families can draw on when life gets difficult. Taking those good characteristics and building on them is a proven way to strengthen the entire family and thus decrease the likelihood of maltreatment. Each of the protective factors is essential, but most important is what they do together to create stability in families. The five protective factors identified in the Strengthening Families framework are as follows:

    • Parental resilience: The ability to cope, bounce back and learn from all types of challenges
    • Social connections: Friends, family members, neighbors, and other members of a community who provide emotional support and concrete assistance to parents
    • Knowledge of parenting and child development: Accurate information about raising young children and appropriate expectations for their behavior.
    • Concrete support in times of need: Financial security to cover day-to-day expenses and unexpected costs that come up from time to time, access to formal supports like TANF and Medicaid, and informal support from social networks
    • Children’s social and emotional development: A child’s ability to interact positively with others and communicate his or her emotions effectively.

Your program DOES NOT need a strategy to connect to ALL of the protective factors (most programs cover one or two)

Outcomes: What one or two changes do you believe will occur in the lives of your program’s participants as a result of your services? Outcome statements are written by determining: WHO will do WHAT in the short, intermediate and potentially long term timeframes; for example:

Short Term Outcomes (First level of change that can be achieved in a short period of time, 6 months, primarily changes in knowledge, attitudes, beliefs or values) – For example:

  • Parents identify at least 3 effective alternatives to corporal punishment
  • Facilitator plan 3 Stewards of Children, Child Sexual Abuse Awareness and Prevention community trainings
  • Early Care providers partner with parents in discussion about child development

Intermediate Outcomes (The link between the short-term outcomes and long-term outcomes; primarily changes in behavior, skills and conditions):

  • Parents will use their knowledge of child development to set appropriate boundaries and apply appropriate positive discipline for their children 0 – 36 months.
  • Facilitator gives Stewards of Children training to 3 faith based community centers and provides follow-up support over the next 6 months.

Long Term Outcomes (The overarching, broad statement of the project’s intended goals):

  • Parents who apply their knowledge of child development will be more likely to use age appropriate positive discipline for their children resulting in healthier family dynamics and reduced chances of child abuse.
  • Communities who are trained in the prevention of Child abuse and neglect take a proactive role to protect children and educate other youth serving organizations about child sexual abuse and prevention.

Indicators: What would I see, hear or read that would tell me the outcome was being achieved? For example:

  • Parents clearly express their expectations
  • Parents use positive discipline techniques when their rules are broken
  • 80% of participants describe appropriate methods of educating inappropriate behaviors

Measurement Tools: What form of measurement will you use to measure your indicators? (A scale, survey, check list, questionnaire, or other measurement tool.)

  • Protective Factor Survey
  • AAPI (Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory) from Nurturing Parenting
  • Attendance rosters and case notes

 

For technical support and other questions, please email ICTF Grant Manager, Kim Hemmert at kim.hemmert@ctf.idaho.gov. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

ICTF Annual Grant Application 2024

Protective Factor Survey (version 2) aka PFS2 PCA Logo ID 1C

 


Disclaimers Required To Receive Federal Funding

  • A portion of the awarded grants is subgranted from the Community Based Child Abuse Prevention Grants (CBCAP), cfda #93.590.
  • Subgrantees spending $750,000.00 or more in federal funds during the Subgrantee’s fiscal year shall have a Single Audit performed according to 2CFR 200.500-521 (previously OMB A-133) and shall provide proof of spending.
  • Entity shall comply with subaward and executive compensation reporting requirements as required by the federal Funding accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA).
  • Applicant acknowledges the Single Audit requirements according to 2CFR 200.500-521 (previously OMB A-133), FFATA, and any specific grant requirements.