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UARK Cares Foundation Community Improvement Grant

Kat Gray

Grant Applications Are Open![1]

A logo for the fictional UArk Cares Foundation: a purple piggy bank with a heart inside, circled by the words UArk Cares, on a black background.

Dear University of Arkansas (UArk) students and Northwest Arkansas (NWA) community leaders,

UARK Cares, with the financial support of the University of Arkansas, is pleased to offer grants to support community-engaged projects that benefit the Northwest Arkansas region and its community members. The purpose of UARK Cares is to help connect the resources offered by the foundation to the community members and organizations who know best how to use them in service of the NWA area at-large.

We accept grant proposals once a year in the Fall. Proposals will be reviewed and rated by the UARK Cares Advisory Board.

We invite grant proposals from any NWA community members with projects aimed to support the community in the following areas:

  • Community access and belonging
  • Environmental preservation
  • Educational access and literacy development
  • Food access and insecurity
  • Mental health
  • Technology and design

The maximum funding UARK Cares will provide per grant is $25,000.

Recently Funded Projects

  • Initiative 1: Local brewery used UARK Cares fund to open a new public tornado shelter in South Fayetteville in response to an uptick in tornadoes affecting the NWA region.
  • Initiative 2: UARK Food Nutrition and Health (FNAH) students partner with a local vegan food truck to create a community fridge and combat food insecurity.
  • Initiative 3: UARK Communication students work with a local PR firm to create a campaign to educate vulnerable community members about housing resources.
  • Initiative 4: UARK football players work with the City of Fayetteville to create a new community garden to battle food insecurity and save the bees.
  • Initiative 5: UARK students used funds to host a music festival celebrating, honoring, and educating the public about local musical traditions and histories.
  • Initiative 6: Local book club requests funds to create a multilingual school literacy program in Springdale, AR.

Eligibility

The proposed initiatives and programs must be free and open to the public. Individuals and groups submitting grant proposals will be more successful if they are affiliated with a local organization or group (other than the University of Arkansas). As an organization affiliated with the University of Arkansas, UARK Cares prefers and typically funds grant proposals that are sufficiently grounded in peer-reviewed research and community expertise.

Please upload your grant proposal as a single pdf file. Every submission should include:

  • Name and contact information
  • Transmittal letter
  • Project description
    • Introduction
    • Purpose
    • Community stakeholders
    • Funding request and plans for use
    • Anticipated outcomes
  • Budget for project
  • References
  • Relevant appendices
  • Resume/CV of grant applicant(s)

On behalf of UARK Cares, I look forward to receiving and evaluating your proposals.

All the best,

Jamie G. Freeman, UARK Cares Foundation President

  1. UArk Cares is a fictional foundation created for the purpose of helping students practice writing in contexts that approach the professional experiences they are likely to have writing these documents. This approach is inspired by Dr. Shyam Pandey's presentation "Beyond Persuasion: Exploring Innovative Approaches to Grant-Writing in TPC," given at ATTW 2025. The UArk Cares Foundation will be the audience for your grant proposal project. ↵

License

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Rhetorical Strategies for Workplace Communication Copyright © 2025 by Kat M. Gray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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