Imagine More Money

My learning organization, a non-profit that supports contractor safety and skills training, uses a variety of funding options in our mix to include: 1) user fees (each CBT costs a certain amount for each contractor), 2) donations (we have a large, hands-on training skills bay with dozens of items, mockups, and tools that have all been donated by our contracting members),  and 3) sponsorships (we provide discounts to those members who become sponsors). These are the three main categories that conform what Schmidt and Yelich Binienki describe in Chapter 5. 

Up until this past year we had not worked to receive a grant for our work. In fact when I broached the subject to my executive leadership team they told me that until 2020 the answer would have been no. Our executives enjoyed being able to tell contracting members and owner members who support our organization that we had never taken any government or other grant money to support our mission. 2019 and 2020 and the organizations use of the PPP to overcome challenges to Covid changed that. 

Thanks to that opening my team and I applied for a grant through Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support innovation in safety and training in 2020. We were not successful. Our organization is allowing us to develop virtual reality training to augment our standard computer based training offering. As there are no contracting members who are asking for this type of training yet, this is purely an R&D project and being funded internally by our organization. 

The concept is to determine if VR and other innovating training strategies significantly improve the contractors ability to work safely in the field environment. Our preliminary studies suggest that they are an improvement, but the cost is prohibitive. If we had won even a portion of the AWS grant we would have been able to develop a third Virtual Reality course to go along with the two we funded ourselves previously. This aligns with the mix that Schmidt and Yelich Binienki (2016) discuss in Chapter 5 in that "organizations applying for grants must provide specific information about the project and it costs" (p. 91).

When considering why we were not awarded the grant, I think that our work did not work in tandem with AWS applications as well as other grant applicants. Part of organizations mindset is to produce our software and applications ourselves. Fitting AWS into that schema is not easy for just one project. I would imagine that other applicants leaned on AWS to a greater degree. We are still looking for other options and grant funding opportunities, and also trying to sell our VR development services to our contracting members as more effective means of transferring the learning objectives to their learners and giving them a competitive advantage over other contractor training products.

References:

Schmidt, S. W., and Yelich Biniecki, S. M. (2016). Organization and administration of adult education programs: A guide for practitioners. Information Age Publishing, Inc.