A big THANK YOU to our CMLE Board for reauthorizing our Extended Mini-Grant program on a short-term basis this school year! We will again be funding grants up to $1,000 for libraries.

We are offering a LIMITED number of mini-grants in this calendar year. If you received a grant last school year, you can apply – but we will prioritize libraries that did not receive a prior grant.

We will also prioritize grants to schools that are serving a higher percent of students with free and reduced lunches. You can check this website for your school’s details.

Note: we are NOT funding schools – we are funding school libraries. The applicant MUST be working in the library to apply for this grant.

You can be pretty flexible in what you apply to use these grants to fund in the library. Programs, materials, services – the three hallmarks of a good library – are all accessible with this money.

Potential mini-grant applications that we would like to see would include requests like:

• filling in a hole in your collection budget
• buying software that will let you do distance library service
• bringing a virtual program, or program series, to your students

Fill out one of our applications.

We will collect the applications, and will have a monthly review of them by a group of CMLE members. Applications will be accepted, rejected, or deferred to a future month for more consideration. We will notify everyone who applies of their status as soon as possible.

(We will not reimburse any money spent prior to notification that you have been awarded a grant. So you want to wait until an official notification before you spend anything!)

If funded, we will ask you to write up a short report about your project that we can publish on our website. We want to share good ideas and good programs (or mistakes to avoid!) across our community. We would definitely love to see photos of your materials/programs/services! (Please be sure you get permission from any people to be in the photo that will go onto our site.)

What if you have never filled out a grant application before this? Don’t worry! We want to give this money away to our members; so we made the application very straight-forward. And you can always reach out to Angie and Mary at admin@cmle.org; we are here to answer your questions, and to help you to get your application in good shape!

Apply today!