The Greenlights Grant Initiative Project

Recently, Academy Award-winning actor and activist Matthew McConaughey was interviewed on Good Morning America about school safety. McConaughey grew up in Uvalde, Texas, where the Robb Elementary School tragedy occurred last year. His foundation is starting a national program called the Greenlights Grant Initiative (GGI). This program connects school districts nationwide to billions of dollars in federal funding to make our schools and children safer.

Camila and Matthew McConaughey were inspired by the parents in Uvalde who asked them to make their lost children's lives matter. The tragedy at Robb Elementary School and countless other mass shootings have continued to devastate our nation. Fortunately, our lawmakers were moved to action last year, leading to the enactment of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first legislation of its kind in 28 years. This bill allocated billions of dollars to help school districts make their schools safer.

Many school district leaders in Texas were either unaware of the federal school safety grants made available by this legislation or had significant difficulty accessing them. Most of these resources are distributed as competitive grants, meaning school districts must proactively apply for these federal programs to get funding for improving school security systems, implementing new safety training programs, or hiring mental health professionals.

Besides the need to be made aware of the availability of federal grants, school district leaders often need help accessing them. Applying for federal assistance is incredibly complex, and hiring a grant writer, which can cost up to $50,000 to write one federal grant, is unobtainable for so many school districts, especially those most in need.

The Greenlights Grant Initiative's mission is to help demystify this process, inform more school districts that these grants are available, help them secure this funding, and make securing these grants easier moving forward.

The Greenlights Grant Initiative offers a short-term philanthropic intervention to help school districts now get the support they need by making them aware of available funding, grant deadlines, and what the grants cover, as well as providing professional grant writing services.

They also offer a wide range of tools and resources to school districts navigating the grant application process, including webinars, guidebooks, how-to’s, and tutorials to help communities win federal dollars. Their long-term goal is to reform the grantmaking system to ensure that securing federal grant funding is relatively easy.

Go to greenlightsgrantinitiative.org to sign up.

You can also learn how Ganz Security solutions can help provide safer school premises and campuses. Our integrations can help prevent, deter, and detect emergency events such as school shootings and violence, medical emergencies, and area breaches with a video management system fully integrated with NDAA-compliant smart cameras, IoT Smart Sensors (vaping, bullying, and gunshot detectors), 3D surveillance, license plate recognition, and emergency communications . Go to ganzsecurity.com/edu to learn more.