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Success Stories
Rose Women’s Organization Finds Its 21st Century Identity
After the nonprofit Rose Hospital was built in the 1940s, spouses and families of hospital staff established Rose Auxiliary to help support the hospital. Volunteer Auxiliary members raised money by running the hospital’s gift shop, renting televisions and photographing newborns for a fee.
Jump forward to 1995. Rose Medical Center, as the hospital was later renamed, was sold to a for-profit health care corporation with the proceeds used to create Rose Community Foundation. This raised some questions for the Auxiliary: Now that there was no longer a nonprofit hospital to support, should it continue to exist? If so, what would its new purpose be?
The organization has continued with a new name – Rose Women’s Organization (RWO) – as a charitable fund of Rose Community Foundation. Its mission is to help women, children and their families.
As it became known as a funding source, “we [RWO] became overloaded and backlogged with grant requests that came from all over the spectrum,” says Lynn Waterman-Blum, chair of RWO’s advisory board. So in 2006, RWO’s members took a fresh look at the organization.
“Our overarching mission is to promote the health, education and welfare of women, children and families,” says Waterman-Blum. “We felt that we could better serve our community by targeting areas of need within this mission over different grant periods.”
So RWO decided to use a new grantmaking process with three key elements:
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a set of objectives that grant proposals must address
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outreach to encourage grant applications from organizations already working on these objectives
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a set timeline for grant submissions and decisions
The first grant cycle ran from March to mid-May 2007, and focused on three areas:
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promoting comprehensive sexuality education
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encouraging well-informed reproductive health choices by women and girls
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reducing the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases with particular attention to the human papillomavirus (HPV)
Of 17 organizations that expressed interest, 11 were invited to submit a grant proposal. In the end, eight organizations received grants in June 2007 totaling more than $88,000.
“It was easier to make good decisions when we were comparing grant proposals focused on the same areas instead of across different areas,” says Waterman-Blum. “And it helped build our board members’ expertise because they educated themselves on a specific area – in this case, women’s sexual health.”
RWO’s 26-member advisory board meets monthly, and is currently planning its next grant cycle and focus. “When they join us, many of our advisory board members have never been involved in grantmaking before,” says Waterman-Blum. “Rose Women’s Organization allows them to learn about areas of need in the community, and how effective we can be collectively.”
Since 1996, Rose Women’s Organization has granted more than $1.1 million to the Greater Denver community.
- From Impact, Rose Community Foundation's newsletter - Fall 2007
A facilitator from Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, one of Rose Women’s Organization’s 2007 grantees, encourages teens to make thoughtful decisions about their sexual behavior.
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