While we acknowledge that Holyoke and New Bedford communities have many important needs and opportunities, given limited funds, the MFF board has identified the above priorities which are the focus of this RFP.  In addition, MFF seeks to support a network of grantees that can collaborate on these issues, to achieve more collectively than they can separately.  Collaborative work becomes harder when there is too much breadth and few overlapping focus areas. 

MFF welcomes organizations with a broader geography as we know that participants and communities are not always reflective of political borders.  However, we do ask that the majority of your work takes place in one of these two cities.

Yes, as long as the primary focus and majority of the work for which you are receiving funding is in New Bedford and Holyoke.  For example, you might have a successful initiative in Springfield that you would like to expand to Holyoke - MFF would likely pay for the expansion work. 

MFF values both depending on the context and goal of the work.  For example, if the focus is building a leadership cohort to steer civic engagement work, we’d expect the work to be deep/high touch.  If the goal is to educate and recruit many people to come to a series of City Council hearings, then the number of participants might be more important.

Yes.  Organizations can apply for and be awarded more than one type of grant.  For example, an organization could be a part of a successful Coalition application, and also receive a Civic Engagement grant.  However, it is most likely that the same organization would receive either a Community Solutions or a Civic Engagement grant.

General operating grants are not assigned to a particular project or program which means that organizations can choose how they spend the funds (e.g., staffing, consultants, training, technical assistance, stipends, professional development, travel and food are all possible expenses).  

Content/format will be driven by grantee needs/interests in 2026.

As a starter, we do think this will be a venue to provide some of the capability building supports we heard about in previous conversations. These could include workshops on topics ranging from budget scenario planning, to fundraising and HR support, to learning about evaluation, data collection, leadership and succession planning.  

We also know that other funder colleagues work on capacity building, and we’d like to collaborate wherever it makes sense. 

Beyond this focus on “content,” in general MFF hopes to foster more collaboration and connection amongst our grantees, the broader non-profit community, funders and city government.  We believe that stronger partnerships and networks can enable communities to achieve many more of their goals, garner more resources, leverage more opportunities and create a strong sense of community and belonging.  We also heard from Roundtable participants that they value and want more time to connect, strategize and build collaborative relationships with funders and other stakeholders.

MFF is interested in tracking your progress, learnings/reflections and effectiveness as evaluated by your organization.  We ask that grantees report to us using space in our on-line system.  You may answer a short series of questions, submit a recently written report that covers these topics, or an annual report.  We will also conduct regular site visits and/or have follow-up conversations once per year.  

We also hope convenings will be a time to reflect on learning and effectiveness with other leaders.

MFF expects that applicants will ask for what is needed to support the proposed work. Please do not ask for the largest amount possible assuming that all requests will be reduced by some percentage.  MFF plans to fund proposals at the level of the request, or not at all, based on alignment with MFF goals.  The budget and time-frame should make sense in terms of the proposal scope, goals and impact.  There is a question in the Narrative Response questions that asks about this specifically, so there is space to respond.

Yes, to the best of your ability. We understand that these structures will likely be less developed than more established coalitions, but we are still looking for a group of organizations who have some level of clearly defined agreed upon how they are working together. 

We absolutely value the knowledge and perspectives of community members- and at the same time we want to be very intentional about how we do community engagement, and what the goals for it are.  We are very relationship-focused, and we don’t want to be extractive.

First, as much as possible, we wanted to avoid asking community members for information that they had already provided in other forums, and to other, more trusted sources with whom they have the potential to develop a direct relationship.  In particular, we didn’t want to consult residents about the challenges they face when there is a lot of material already available about these, and when we as MFF don’t have a way of directly addressing these challenges.  We wanted to avoid a classic problem with engagement where community members are consulted but then they don’t see anything change as a result. 

So, to better understand Holyoke and New Bedford, we began with a mult-month process of  “desk top research” (reading reports, looking at websites etc.) from a variety of governmental and nonprofit sources.  

We built out a working understanding of each geography this way, and then developed a set of questions that we asked in some in-person conversations this spring with 12 - 15 local non-profit and community leaders,  city agency staff, and local funder colleagues to test our conclusions and go deeper about some of the challenges facing each city in relation to MFF’s priority areas.

We have a small staff, and we wanted to get this RFP out in July so that we could start getting money out the door by the end of the year.  So, we wanted to be very focused on starting to build connections with non-profits. We hosted a 2.5 hour Grantmaking Roundtable in each city with 25 - 35 non-profit leaders.  The goal of the Roundtables was to solicit feedback and input about our grantmaking process, including the kinds of grants, format of applications, criteria, grant amounts etc. as well as the capacity building and training needs of the non-profit community.  This RFP reflects a lot of the feedback we received during the interviews and Roundtables.

We got the word out about the Roundtables through local funder colleagues and other contacts we’d met over the past few months, but roundtable attendance wasn’t a requirement for receiving funding.

We shared Roundtable notes with all participants and the feedback resulted in several key changes to our proposed grantmaking.

Now, going forward, this doesn’t mean we won’t want to engage with community members in other ways going forward, particularly by visiting first hand the programs/initiatives/projects that we help support and getting insights that way. But through it all we want to be guided by the idea that we should be about non-extractive consultations and about having interactions be beneficial for everyone we interact with, not just ourselves.

Please email us at rfp@merckff.org!