Aviva Community Fund (OT)

[woodstove]

Here is an opportunity for those of us interested, to put our business venture analysis skills to socially beneficial use.

 

Aviva Community Fund (funded by Aviva insurance group) at www.avivacommunityfund.org is soliciting ideas for community improvement projects across Canada.  Project ideas input is open, with accompanying brief description, and website visitors can vote on ideas they feel deserve support.  The idea seems to be that the short list will be determined by website visitor voting, and then fund staff will follow up with that short list to choose the actual funding recipients, amounts, etc.  Three categories of project size (<10k, 10k-50k, 50k-250k) and various project types (rejuvenate neighbourhood, support youth, improve education, etc).

 

The website is a bit complicated to navigate.  Basically, if you want to go thru and review all the proposals, it seems most effective to click on "explore ideas", choose the "list" form of display which will be sorted by "most recent", go to last page of list (approx page 27 presently, 10 proposals per page), click on each proposal of interest to read further info and have the option to vote in support of it, and use "back" on browser nav-bar to get back to project list page you came from.

 

Once one has voted, those projects are added to your "my supported ideas" shortlist.  You can vote again on subsequent days (once/day if you feel inclined).  I'm treating it as sort of like a resume filtering task, selecting a list of potentially beneficial projects, planning a subsequent scan thru that list to vote an additional time.

 

Good activity for a slow day.  Some interesting ideas - some from well organized groups, others from individuals who seem to have potential and a small bit of funding (under $10k) might encourage them in good directions.  I think the project proposal review is an ideal task for our skillsets, as we have so much practical experience in looking at business proposals, filtering out the get-it-done types from the self-serving or air-headed, etc.

 

The fund plans to close submissions and voting at end of October (maybe Nov 1st).

 

Disclaimer: not affiliated with Aviva or their projects.  Visited website at request of a friend to consider voting for his project proposal.