Island Innovation Fund delays Round Two launch

By Christine van Bergeijk
Vice President for Programs
Hawaii Community Foundation

In October of last year the Hawaii Community Foundation launched the Island Innovation Fund. This grantmaking program was intended to catalyze new thinking across the nonprofit sector around ways to increase impact in an environment of shrinking resources and growing need. We have seen the challenges that this economic climate have brought to our sector and we are convinced that in order  to continue to be the source of new ideas around social change nonprofits must look towards forging a different future.

The Island Innovation Fund had several new design elements for HCF. It was the first time we used an open transparent process utilizing a web-based platform. We had 183 organizations submit concepts for consideration during our first round of grantmaking. In the end we selected 5 organizations for awards totaling $461,199. 

Upon completing the first round, HCF solicited feedback from 354 users of the website to help us understand what worked and what didn’t. There is nothing more valuable than honest and constructive feedback to help us improve on a new idea. We want to thank everyone who took the time to respond to the survey or to participate in one of the focus groups that were held. Your comments were overwhelmingly supportive of our intent and your criticisms were respectful and incredibly helpful. We will be posting the results from both the survey and focus groups on the IIF website, http://islandinnovation.org. 

Based on this feedback we realized that we would need to make extensive improvements to the website, its functionality, and its design. We also decided to make some changes to simplify the various steps of the application process. Lastly, we are working on improving the application questions at all stages, clarifying the criteria that we are using to evaluate the applications, and trying to provide better explanations for what kinds of innovations we are looking for. All of this is going to take us a little longer than we had hoped and we therefore have decided to delay the launch of Round Two.

We expect to launch in the fall and will use the website and an email blast to keep you posted as we get a firm date. We apologize for the delay and hope that by taking the time to get it right we will make this next round a more rewarding experience for everyone. Again, without your participation we would never have gotten this far.