The Impact Award provides an opportunity to pursue an innovative, collaborative, bold strategy to address food insecurity as part of the City’s overall gun violence prevention strategy that will promote thriving neighborhoods and improve physical and mental health for families.
Donor Name: United Way of Greater Cincinnati
State: Ohio
City: Cincinnati
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 04/21/2025
Size of the Grant: $500,000 to $1 million
Grant Duration: 2 Years
Details:
The Impact Award is an innovative funding opportunity that represents 10% of the City of Cincinnati’s Human Services funding budget. Administered by United Way of Greater Cincinnati on behalf of the City, this award supports one large-scale social innovation project featuring multiple partners with a diverse array of strategies.
The fiscal year 2026 Impact Award is for: Food insecurity as a part of the broader gun violence prevention strategies.
Funding Priorities
- Projects that prioritize community collaboration and include multiple organizations with one lead agency applicant. Collaborative applications must demonstrate how the partner program services will be woven together in order to achieve the innovative strategy, they should not be stand-alone descriptions of each individual provider’s standard services.
- Projects MUST benefit residents in three or more of the top 10 neighborhoods experiencing gun violence:
- OTR
- Avondale
- Westwood
- West End
- Roselawn
- Winton Hills
- West Price Hill
- Mt. Airy
- East Price Hill
- Walnut Hills.
- Projects that utilize a diverse array of strategies, including, but not limited to:
- Getting food into the hands of food insecure city residents
- Using a client choice model where the client is involved in choosing the foods provided
- Improving access to food by identifying and addressing barriers to a participants’ ability to benefit including the operational hours of a service provider conflicting with a participant’s work schedule, transportation barriers to access the service location etc.
- Providing nutrition and cooking education
- Developing and implementing an effective communication/marketing plan, to ensure potential beneficiaries are aware of services.
- Including consideration of available cooking supplies (refrigeration, oven/stove, appliances, tools etc.), lifestyle and skills to utilize the available. food donations.
- Incorporating local food aggregation and community-supported agriculture (CSA).
- haring resources to help prevent or minimize wasted food.
Grant Period
Funding under the Impact Award is for a one-time grant, to begin on September 1, 2025 and must be expended by August 31, 2027.
Funding Information
It is anticipated that approximately $800,000 dollars will be allocated for the Impact Award.
Eligibility Criteria
The following policies have been established:
- Agencies must be 501(c)3 organizations compliant with licensing, accreditation, and legal requirements. Nonprofit organizations do not need to be physically located in the City of Cincinnati, but City of Cincinnati Human Services funds may only be used to support city residents. Submitting a program proposal is not a guarantee of funding.
- The City of Cincinnati may elect not to fund or advance any applicants with known management, fiscal, reporting, program, or other problems that make it unlikely that they would be able to provide effective services.
- All funding decisions are made by Cincinnati City Council based on the recommendation of the Human Services Advisory Committee.
- Qualification under the criteria and eligibility requirements listed in the Request for Proposal does not entitle an organization to receive funding.
- The funded Impact Award project will be ineligible to receive any additional funding from the Human Services Fund for the duration of the grant period. That is, they may not receive a grant from both the Impact Award and Services category for the same project. However, members of the collaborative may, as individual organizations, request and receive funding through the HSF during the open application cycle for other unrelated programs/projects.
- The City of Cincinnati reserves the right to reject any and all programs, in part or in whole; to negotiate with applicants and to award funding to those programs deemed most likely to contribute to the success of the Human Services Fund priorities.
- Organizations may be the lead applicant for only one Impact Award proposal; organizations may be a partner in multiple applications.
- Partnerships may not duplicate programs/services provided by entities within the City of Cincinnati, e.g. Health Department, Recreation Department, etc., but are encouraged to consider how City programs and services may support their efforts.
- There is no preference for or against agencies that have previously received Human Services Funding or that have a relationship with United Way of Greater Cincinnati.
- The City of Cincinnati, in accordance with the Public Records Act (Section 149.43 of the Ohio Revised Code), defines records as including the following: any document-paper, electronic (including but not limited to e-mail), or other format-that is created or received by, or comes under the jurisdiction of this office. All proposal submissions on behalf of the City of Cincinnati are public unless they are exempt from disclosure under the Ohio Revised Code.
For more information, visit UWGC.
