Every year Impact 100 strives to improve our process and procedures. This year we started down the path of “going green” by testing the idea of paperless grant review in the Environment, Preservation and Recreation Committee. Rather than receiving a pile of grant applications this year, each member of this committee received a CD with the all their applications. The test was successful and the plan will be to roll this approach to all the committees by next year.
This year we made fewer copies than the last several years but still used over 22,000 pages of paper. By going paperless, we should be able to not only save trees, using electronic reproduction, but we will be much more efficient and require far less time and effort.
A more efficient process will decrease the time it takes to process the applications when they arrive so the committees can start to review the applications sooner. Because our grant review occurs during the spring months, spring break often causes delays in meetings and sometimes members miss meetings. We expect that we will be able to start committee meeting 2 weeks earlier next year and thus avoid spring break conflicts.
We are still considering the best way to electronically deliver the grant applications to each member. If you have expertise or have contacts to obtain USB flash drives or CDs, please contact Lynn Sprafka at
lsprafka@aol.com .
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