A CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT GRANT

The Title V Cooperative Grant was secured to assist campuses with increasing funding to advance critical areas of each participating institution. This unique grant serves four of our colleges within the Los Angeles Community College District—City, East, Southwest, and Trade-Tech. It is a Title V (Hispanic Serving Institutions) grant for $3.2 million over five years that is designed to help us by “closing the funding gap.” In short, it is capacity development grant.

In short this grant affords us the opportunity to significantly increase extramural funding by:

1. Developing our institutional foundations,
2. Developing our grant writing capabilities, and
3. Developing our business partnerships.

In short, it is a "Capacity Development Grant."

ABOUT TITLE V

Title V of the Higher Education Act (HEA) was created in 1998 to expand educational opportunities for Hispanic students in order to increase their postsecondary academic success through the expansion and enhancement of the academic offerings, program quality, and institutional stability of the colleges and universities that educate the majority of Hispanic college students in the United States.

A TRUE COOPERATIVE

The Cooperative arrangement of the grant is perhaps the single most beneficial aspect of the grant. As a result of meeting, planning and decision making among the Cooperative institutions we have produced some unforeseen and welcomed results. The Executive Committee, the Implementation Team and grant personnel that include the Title V Director, the Associate Director of Foundation Relations, the Title V Compliance Officer, and four grant coordinators have been conducting many groundbreaking activities that have strengthened the manner in which we act as a Cooperative. Among them are the monthly meetings that the Implementation Team conducts, which acts as a decision making, planning, and sharing forum. It was within these team meetings that a sense of equal value and importance developed, which in turn has led to the ability to see each institutional strength to be seen as strength for the entire group.
The end result of this first year is that Title V activities are being taken very seriously at each college, which could not have happened without the Cooperative arrangement. The Cooperative arrangement forces us to rely and trust each other in order to build the capacity of each institution. The reality at this point is that going into our second year of the Title V grant, we have four institutions that act as one entity, when it comes to developing the structure, means and capacity for foundation development, grantwriting, and educational partnerships with business and industry.