How to Get Funding for Low Income Tutoring of Students

Getting funding for low-income tutoring can be difficult if you’re not a nonprofit organization. If you’re a privately owned tutoring service, the best way to get funding is to approach other privately owned businesses and individuals and let them know what your program is about. Hopefully they will be kind enough to help you out. Another way to get funding is to get your services declared as a 501c3 organization and apply for the numerous educational grants that are available to organizations with this status.

Apply to have your tutoring service recognized as a nonprofit (501c3) organization. Go to irs.gov and download the proper forms. It will either be form 1023 or 1024. Follow the directions for applying and submit the required fee along with the form. Once you have been approved as a nonprofit organization, you will be tax exempt as well as able to apply for government and foundation funding for your program.

Write out a detailed grant proposal, giving information on how much money is needed to run your tutoring service as well as what your services will include and the targeted demographics. This should include how much money is needed for supplies, whether or not you will have employees and how much is needed to pay them, monies need to pay for rental space, etc. You will need to provide this information when you apply for grants. You can enlist the help of a professional grant writer or you can write the proposal yourself. There are numerous resources on and off line too that can help with grant proposal writing.

Search a funding database to see what funding opportunities are available to organizations that focus on education of low-income students. You can start your search at grants.gov to see what government grants are available. To get funding from private foundations, a good site to search is channing-bete.com. This site serves as a database for foundations that give out funding to nonprofit organizations.

Apply for the grants that fit your organization criteria. Although you can apply for more than one at a time, the application process can be lengthy for some grants. Some grants may ask for different information from others. Because of this, you may want to focus your efforts on applying to one at a time instead of multiple ones so that you don’t get application procedures mixed up among different grants.

Follow all grant stipulations once you receive your funding. This will help you if the funding source renews funds after a certain period of time. Usually those organizations that stay within the funding criteria are granted repeat monies. Your repeat funding criteria may include that you have a certain amount of students enrolled in your program or that you offer your services a certain amount of hours per week.