When Ray Zeiss visited Kitwe, Zambia, a few years ago, he was staggered by the fact that as many as one-quarter of the country’s young women are HIV positive. 

Zeiss, a retired physician and a member of the Rotary Club of Wilmette, Ill., USA, returned home and asked his club to apply for a grant from The Rotary Foundation to provide a health clinic in Kitwe with medical equipment that detects HIV infection. “They had some type of screening program, but they couldn’t determine who needed treatment and who didn’t,” he says.

After obtaining a Matching Grant that, together with club and district contributions, totaled US$12,000, Zeiss came away with some ideas on what to do – and what not to do – when applying for a grant.

Clubs applying for a Foundation humanitarian grant need a local partner, and it’s important to find the right one. Zeiss found his club’s partner, the Rotary Club of Kitwe North, when he attended a meeting there. Rotarians can use Club Locator at www.rotary.org to find clubs in or near the community where they’re thinking of doing a project, and can use the ProjectLINK database to find clubs who are looking for a partner. “You can’t go too far afield,” Zeiss notes, “because you need to have somebody who knows the community.”

Making sure any other partners are a good fit is equally important. In this case, the health clinic in Zambia is operated by World Vision, an organization Zeiss had volunteered with on medical missions. “You need to have international partners who know what they’re doing,” he says. “Know the quality of your partners and their track record.”

For Robert Lyon, a member of the Rotary Club of Wheaton, Ill., getting a firsthand look at a community’s needs was invaluable.

On a visit to Kabale, Uganda, as a USAID volunteer, he discovered the lack of funding faced by rural schools. “If possible, see the situation with your own eyes,” he says. “It makes it so much easier to come back and talk about the need.”

Lyon saw schools that lacked books and had pits for toilets. Floors were made of a mix of mud, water, and cow dung. “That’s known as the poor man’s cement,” says Lyon of the flooring. “It hardens, but it has insects in it that cause foot diseases in children.”

A US$15,000 Matching Grant – which, together with District Designated Fund allocations and contributions from the Rotary Club of Kabale and the Rotary clubs of Wheaton, West Chicago, and Carol Stream, Ill., totaled US$34,500 – has paid for books, the installation of eco-friendly toilets, and concrete floors. “Involve other clubs,” Lyon recommends, “so you can do projects on a larger scale.”

The grant process can take longer with additional partners, but what will really slow things down is an incomplete application. Susan Doxtator, Central and South America humanitarian grants supervisor for The Rotary Foundation, says the Foundation will notify a club if information is missing and give them a chance to supply it. “But if they have a time-sensitive project, that delay could kill it,” she says.

Zeiss says he got help from his district in completing his application. “They can give you guidance on your idea and the feasibility of how much you can ask for. It’s really a helpful place to start.”

Another crucial point is to be sure your club is up to date in reporting the status of projects funded by previous grants. “An overdue or incomplete report is another reason an application can be returned,” Doxtator says. “It’s poor stewardship of donor funds to award new grants if previous ones were unreported or incomplete.”

Conflict of interest is also a potential pitfall. “That’s not something that people usually think about,” says Doxtator. “They want to get the best deal for the project. But if their brother-in-law is a supplier, that can reflect badly on Rotary.”  

Finally, when working with a club in a country with a weak technological infrastructure, Zeiss says, patience is key. “If e-mail goes down for two months,” he stresses, “never give up. Expect delays.”

The effort is worth it. The medical equipment provided by the grant Zeiss and his club applied for is in the clinic and operational, he says. “It’s changed the way they treat people.”