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Thornton staff unveils first annual strategic grant plan after $35 million in 2024 awards
Summary
The city introduced a new annual strategic grant plan to match concept‑ready projects to funding opportunities, increase grant readiness and track outcomes; staff reported 27 awards in 2024 totaling $35 million (including a $25 million RAISE award).
Rebecca Abrahamson, the city’s grant program manager, presented the proposed annual strategic grant plan and said the purpose is to align grant opportunities with known city projects and priorities.
"The purpose of it is to help us identify specific grant opportunities and match those up closely with projects that we know are in need and projects that we know align with, the priorities that we wanna accomplish as a city for our community," Rebecca said. She described a six‑step approach: identify likely grant opportunities, align them with concept‑ready projects, do pre‑application readiness work, apply, remain nimble for new opportunities, and evaluate outcomes.
Erica Cena, the budget and operations director, introduced Rebecca and noted the position was newly created in 2024 to strengthen grant capacity. Rebecca summarized 2024 performance: Thornton submitted 50 grant applications requesting about $49 million, had 27 awards totaling roughly $35 million and had 9 pending applications requesting about $9.3 million. She highlighted that $25 million of the $35 million award total came from a single RAISE award for the 104 widening project.
Rebecca said Thornton’s application success rate in 2024 was 66 percent (27 awards out of 41 final decisions), down from about 73 percent in 2023 but that staff judged the drop acceptable because the city pursued more competitive federal opportunities. She described metrics the plan will track: dollars secured, application success rate, number of applications, and the degree to which awards map to council priorities.
Council members praised the results and asked for clarifications about how pending awards will be counted and about support for arts and culture applicants. Rebecca said pending awards submitted in 2024 would be counted in 2024 results if the award notification came after submission in that year. She said she’s already meeting with arts and culture staff about SCFD and other opportunities.
Ending
Staff will use the strategic grant plan to prioritize applications that tie directly to council priorities, prepare pre‑application work to improve competitiveness, and track outcomes with the new metrics. Council asked for continued updates and noted the $35 million in awards is a significant increase from roughly $7–8 million in 2023.
