- Grant name: Crane Mountain Valley Horse Rescue Capacity Building Challenge
- Project size: $112K Grant size: $10K matching challenge, with potential renewal (7/19)
- Strategic value: CMVHR is a humanitarian and educational nonprofit dedicated to equine rescue and rehabilitation, restoring horsemanship, the heritage and humane treatment of the horse. Equally important, its mission is to prevent abuse before it starts, enrich lives and empower people of all ages and abilities. Through high-quality education and outreach programs that are in growing demand, paid staff and the horses in rehab act as teachers who help heal and open hearts. The capacity building grant is designed to attract new donors and establish a reliable funding stream, so that CMVHR can hire one additional staff person to keep pace with community needs.
- Project status (11-19): Responding to the challenge, one donor gave half of the match outright. Another ran a marathon to raise the rest. Pledges for this beloved organization flooded in, totaling $100,000, of which $75,000 was from first-time donors. The impact of the additional staff person has already meant that enrollment in the afterschool program has tripled. When schools were closed unexpectedly one day, CMVHR’s after school program extended its hours to cover normal school hours–an emergency community support made possible by adequate staffing. Further, the Barn Manager was able to attend a four-day professional development conference in Massachusetts.
The Adirondacks are full of organizations that we love and that are irreplaceable. Cloudsplitter will continue to evaluate and prioritize systemic threats so that we have the resources to respond now and into the future. Given the unknowns of the current funding environment, we wanted to be clear with our grant applicants that we may be less likely to fund capital projects, events, projects far outside the Adirondack park, and very large grant requests ($50K+) at this time. If you feel something within those categories deserves our attention, please contact chenelle@cloudsplitter directly prior to submitting a grant to discuss further.