This past Wednesday (4/12/17) our grant proposals were due, as a class we were very excited to start the process of selecting an organization to receive the grant. At the beginning of the semester we established that in order to have a conflict of interest a student must have had contact with an organization within the current semester. Originally we thought that we would split into two groups and group A would judge group B's organizations but we quickly learned that our class had too many conflicts of interest for this method to work ethically.
After some careful deliberation we decided to put all 20 organizations up on the board and have each student sign up to score 5 organizations that they had no conflict of interest with. Our white board thought process is pictured above (also the pizza, Thanks Learning by Giving!). This will result in 10 students scoring each grant using a rubric we designed as a class. The rubric assigns points to each aspect of the grant from 1-3 in each category. We decided that we would share the scores with each other next Wednesday (4/19/17) to avoid having other students scores impact our own scores.
Next week after the total scores are revealed we plan to take the highest 3-5 scores (depending on how far apart the scores are) and deliberate further as a class to decide the final organizations to receive the two grants. We are all very excited to see this process to it's completion and I know we will all take careful time to score and rank these grants as we know the impact of the money could make significant changes in these organizations.