The floors are freshly waxed. The pencils are newly sharpened. Dozens of students are coming to your room; school is back in session. If you’re like me, you’ve spent most of the summer buying SAE projects for students, going back and forth to Dallas for the FFA convention and ATAT conference, and planning the upcoming school year. With that comes new ideas and projects for your Program of Activities, but where will the funding come from?
Cue: National FFA Grants.
The National FFA Organization has several grants that many teachers are unaware of, ripe for the picking—trying to financially cover a cool community service project for your small town? Maybe you need supplies for that new floral design class they added to your schedule. Are you trying to raise meat rabbits through your chapter to provide an SAE for your students? National FFA Grants have you covered.
To start, visit the National FFA Grant webpage.
This will direct you to the two main types of grants available through National FFA: Grants for Growing and Living to Serve Grants. You can explore each to find out which one meets the needs of the project you have in mind.
Grants for Growing are available to middle and high school chapters trying to improve the reach of “Doing to Learn” by providing funds up to $5,000. These grants can be awarded to create new project-based opportunities for students or to strengthen existing opportunities. They can help grow your classroom, your FFA chapter, or ag awareness in general.
Remember the need for supplies for that new floral design class? Here’s your grant for that - but don’t stop there; the possibilities are endless for project-based or experiential learning. The key is putting hands-on experiences (literally) in the hands of our students.
Living to Serve Grants are also available to middle and high school chapters, but they also open up the opportunity to alumni and collegiate FFA chapters. This grant is designed to help fund a community service project. It must fit into one of the four preselected areas (community safety, hunger, health and nutrition, environmental responsibility, or community engagement).
This grant further breaks into three main types of grants that might work for your chapter. Yearlong grants are a year-long commitment that awards up to $3,000. Semester grants can be up to $1,200 in the spring or fall semesters. Lastly, day of service mini-grants only require a one-day project and can provide up to $400 for your chapter to give back to the community.
Don’t have an idea for a grant? That is okay, too! Each one of these grant pages has a United States map that shows where past grants have been awarded. Click on any marked schools and see what they did with the money awarded. Hopefully, one of these past projects will inspire you to come up with something new and engaging to bring back to your FFA chapter.