ELGL has grant proposal to raise $25,000 to fund research costs to collect race, gender, veteran status, and age data for every local government chief administrative officer (CAO) and assistant CAO in the nation. It’s the continuation of great work that’s already been done in NC, WI, CO, and CA.
Think about it: there’s no single source of information about the race, gender, veteran status, and age of the people leading our local governments. There’s no way to compare and contrast communities where leadership is representative of their community members. There’s no place to learn from best practices (or recognize where progress isn’t occurring).
This is an important project and we want to get it done – soon. We don’t mind pouring our hearts out to potential funders about why it’s important. But we also don’t want to wait, jump through hoops, navigate a bunch of red tape, and let this data go uncollected for another six months.
So, ELGL is dipping our toe into the Kickstarter world. Our goal is to raise the full $25,000 research cost in 29 days. It’s aggressive, but that’s the approach we are taking with this data collection. We want a full data set so we start 2018 knowing where we stand and where we need to improve.