1. Self-Advocacy Organizational Development Grants Review Panel Training
Dawn: Welcome to the Webinar. Today we will be talking about your role in reviewing the applications for grants for self-advocacy organizations. My name is Dawn Rudolph and I am the TA Director at the Association of University Centers on Disabilities or AUCD.
I would like to take a minute to explain the tools available to you during this webinar. We are all using Adobe Connect – a software that lets us to have this online meeting and share information over the computer. On the left hand side of your screen you will see a box labeled Chat. You can use this box to type in questions or if you are having problems with the technology. Below that box is the Attendees box. You can scroll up and down in this box to see who else is in this meeting. In the middle of the screen you can see our presentation. This is where we will be showing the information we are presenting today. On the right hand side of your screen you will see a closed captioning box. This will show everything that is said aloud over the phone in text form on your screen. At the top of the box you can change the font size, color and background to what allows you to best read the text.
Because of the number of people on the phone, we will have everyone on mute while we are presenting and then unmute for questions. This means that right now if you are speaking, we can’t hear you. We open the lines when it is time for questions. If you have a question while you are muted type in your question to the chat pod and we will answer it when we get to the question section.
This webinar will be recorded and available later this week for you to view again. We will you when it is available.

2. Today’s Presenters from AUCD
Liz Weintraub Rachel Patterson
Today’s presenters are Liz Weintraub and Rachel Patterson. Both Liz and Rachel are staff at the AUCD. Rachel as an ally and Liz as a self-advocate. I’m going to now turn it over to Liz.

3. Webinar Schedule Introduction to Self-Advocacy Grants
What are panel reviews?
Timeline for reviewing grants
AUCD’s online application system
Scoring rubrics
Panel teleconferences
Thanks Dawn.
On the webinar today, we will discuss:
--An overview of the Self-Advocacy Organizational Development Grants
--What a review panel does
--The timeline and process for reviewing these grants
--AUCD’s online application system that you will use to access the grant materials you are responsible for reviewing
--The scoring rubrics, or guidelines, that you will use to evaluate the grant applications and provide a score
--and The discussions your panel will have over the phone to decide a final score for the grant applications

4. Background
Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AIDD)
Mini-grants to help self-advocacy organizations become more independent
Result of the self-advocacy summits
First, a little background on the grants.
The money for these grants is coming from the Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, or AIDD. AIDD is responsible for representing people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in the federal government and is in charge of the DD Network – the University Centers, Protection & Advocacy Systems, and DD Councils. Over the past 2 years, this DD network, along with self-advocacy groups across the country, came together in a series of summits to discuss and strengthen self-advocacy. These grants were developed as a direct result of those summits, since self-advocates talked so much about wanting to be more independent. For more information on these partners, or the summits, see the Allies in Self-Advocacy website at

5. The Grants
Grant A: grants for self-advocacy organizations to grow and become stronger
5 grants of $5,000
Grant B: grants for self-advocacy organizations to provide peer-to-peer assistance help others grown and become stronger
3 grants of $30,000
There are two kinds of grants offered. Grant A is for self-advocacy organizations that are not yet independent nonprofits to grow and become stronger in order to become their own independent groups. We can give 5 of these at $5,000 each. Grant B is for those self-advocacy organizations that have already become independent nonprofits to give peer-to-peer assistance to help other self-advocacy groups get there too. We can give 3 of these at $30,000 each.
As a reviewer, you might review both of these kinds of applications, or just one. It depends on how many we get of each kind.

6. What Are Panel Reviews? Most grants are reviewed by panels
Reviewers will
Read grants and write down the scores
Work in groups to decide on a final score
Our panels include:
1 Self-Advocate
1 DD Network Member
1 AIDD Staff Member
Panel facilitator
AUCD staff member
Next, we will cover the basics of panel reviews.
Most grants of any kind are reviewed by panels. A panel is another word for a group of people who work together. Each grant application is read by a group of people who work together to decide a score for it. As a reviewer, you will read each grant application that you are assigned and come up with your own score. Then, in a telephone conference with the other reviewers in your group of 3, you will work together to come to a score. You will have a guide, or rubric, to help you decide how to score each application.
Our review panels will include one self-advocate, one DD network member who works at a University Center, DD Council, or Protection & Advocacy agency, and one AIDD staff member. Each panel will be facilitated by one of us who works at AUCD.
Once we have all the scores from all of the panel reviewers, we at AUCD will compare them all to each other. The applications that got the highest scores will be awarded the grant money. If there are tied scores, we will consider other things such as whether the organizations applying for the grant come from different parts of the country, or from minority groups. Diversity will break the tie!

7. Important Documents for Panel Reviewers
To be ready to review grants, you will need:
The grant documents
Panel Member Scoring Rubric (A and B)
Grant Review Panel Notice
If you have any questions, you should look to:
Grant Review Frequently Asked Questions
The RFA (Request for Applications)
The webinar recordings
To read and review the grant applications assigned to you, you will need a couple of documents. First, you’ll need the grant application materials. We’ll talk about where you get those in a few minutes. Second, you’ll need the scoring rubric. This is the document where you will write down your scores and we’ll also talk about that in a few minutes. Finally, you’ll need the Grant Review Panel Notice. This provides information on the panel review process.
Next, there are a few documents you should look to if you have any questions. The first is the list of Frequently Asked Questions – this includes questions from applicants about the grants and questions about panel reviewers that AIDD has received in the past. The next is the Request for Applications or RFA. This is the document that the applicants use to apply for the grants, and includes lots of information on the grants, the documents they will use, and it explains some of the terms that are used in the grants. Finally, the recording of this webinar and the webinar we held for the grant applicants are other good places to look for information.
All of these are available on the Allies in Self-Advocacy website.

8. Your Job as a Reviewer is Very Important!
It is important that you:
Be impartial
Read each grant thoroughly
Ask questions when you have them
Keep the information you read private
Your job as a panel reviewer is very important. Your score will help decide who should get money from the federal government, and there are laws in place to be sure this is done fairly.
This is why we want to make sure that no one who is reading grant applications will benefit if one of the grants wins. This is why we asked you to confirm that you are not affiliated with any of the organizations applying for grants. This means that you cannot be in the leadership or strongly active membership of any of the organizations applying for grants. If you are, you’re not in trouble, just please us after this webinar is over. We want the process to be as fair as possible.
It is also important that you read each grant thoroughly and ask questions when you have them. We want to make sure that everyone understands the grants they are reading so they can give the right score.
Finally, it is important that you keep the information you read private. In the applications, groups share their private financial and other information, which should not be shared with anyone outside of the review panel.

9. Timeline Reviewer training (right now) Applications due – November 26
Materials sent to reviewers – November 28
Reviewers read grants and provide scores – November 28-December 10
Additional webinar to answer your questions – December 6
Review panel discussions – December 10-18
Awards Announced – December 21, 2012
Now we will go over the timeline of reviewing grants. The first item on the timeline is your reviewer training. We are doing that right now!
Next, grants are due November 26. That’s the Monday after Thanksgiving. After all of the grant applications are submitted, we will work as quickly as we can to compile all the grants together and assign reviewers to each grant. We will you by Wednesday, November 28 to tell you which grants you are in charge of reviewing.
Once you get your grant materials, you should take the time to read them carefully. We will hold an additional webinar to answer your questions on Thursday, December 6. It would be best if you read as much of the applications as you can before that webinar so we can answer questions that you might have as you read the applications. You don’t have to attend this webinar, but it is a good idea if you have any questions.
Next, you will meet in groups over the telephone and computer between December 10 and 18 to discuss the scores they gave each grant and come to a final score. AUCD staff members will facilitate each call.
After all of the calls are done, AUCD will compile all of the group scores. The applications that got the highest scores will be awarded the grants. In the case of a tie, we will consider the diversity of the applicants to break the tie.
Now I’ll turn it over to Rachel to discuss the online application system

10. AUCD Online Application System
Thanks Liz.
Now we will discuss AUCD’s online application system, which you will use to access the grant documents you’ll be reviewing. To get to the system, go to

11. Enter the AUCD Online System
Type in the username and password that were ed to you
AUCD has ed you a username and password. Be sure to save these s or write them down. When you are ready to download grant materials, go to aucd.org/app. You should type in your username CLICK and password CLICK and click submit CLICK.

12. Your applications to review
Once you click submit, you will see a list of all of the grants you are assigned to review, listed by the name of the main applicant. To get to the grant materials, click on the applicant’s name. For this example, I clicked on John Hartman to see the materials from his group.

13. Downloading applications
Click on a document to download it
Once you click on John’s name, we can see his information. This page includes his contact information and the documents he submitted for the grant. Let’s zoom in on the top part of the page. CLICK.
PAUSE
Here we can see John’s contact information. CLICK. If we zoom in on the bottom part of his application, CLICK we can see his materials.
To download a document click on the title CLICK. If you do this for each document on the page, you will download John’s entire application and be ready to read it.
Download each document in the application

14. Your applications to review
Once you have finished downloading one application, go back to the main menu and repeat the steps for each application you need to review.
If you ever need to find documents again, you can come back to aucd.org/app to find the documents you need.

15. Reviewing applications - Rubrics
Once you have all of the materials for each grant downloaded, it’s time to review the grants!
AUCD has sent you two rubrics, one for Grant A and one for Grant B. A rubric is like a scorecard that you use to keep track of what points you have awarded to the grant application in each section. The one shown here is for Grant A, and the Grant B rubric looks very similar, but has slightly different questions and requirements.
The first column shows what part of the application you are scoring. CLICK It also provides some guiding questions about what information you are supposed to score.
The second column shows the points available. CLICK This is the maximum number of points that you can award each grant for each section.
The last column is where you write your score for each section CLICK
On the rubric, you will write a score for each of the sections based on how well you think that the applicants met the goal of the grant. We have provided some guiding questions under each section to help you decide.

16. Reviewing Application – What do the points mean?
If you are unsure how to award points, look at the last page of the Grant Review Panel Notice. Here, you can rate a section in words, either Outstanding, Good, Fair, Poor, or Unsatisfactory, then choose the number of points that corresponds to that word. For example, if you are looking at the section of a grant about a group’s plans for the future CLICK and you think they did an outstanding job CLICK, you can award 9-10 points CLICK.
You don’t have to follow this guide, but it is available to you if you find words easier to use than numbers.

17. Reviewing applications - comments
On the second page of the rubric, we also ask you fill out the comments on each section of the application. It is a great way to give additional information on your thoughts about different parts of the application. Please write any thoughts that you have and feel free to use more space if you need it. The application scores and comments can be seen by the applicant, so it’s helpful to be clear and honest without being hurtful

18. Turn in your reviews Send finished rubrics to Anna at AUCD
Please save files with the name of the self-advocacy organization and your last name
For example: SpringfieldSelf-Advocates_Patterson
When you have finished your rubrics with both scores and comments, please send them to Anna in the AUCD office. You can them to her at
If you can, please save your rubrics with file names that show the name of the organization and your last name. For example, if I was reviewing an application from Springfield Self-Advocates, I would save the file as Springfield-Self-Adovcates_Patterson. CLICK
If you have questions at any time, can’t figure out how to download or save the applications you will be reviewing, please feel free to or call Anna or Liz.

19. Panel teleconferences
Phone/webinar conferences will be held December 10-18
The next step is to meet with your panel together in phone/webinar conferences to discuss the scores. As we said earlier, you will be in groups of three, and we will plan a meeting for everyone in your group to come together to discuss the grants and the scores you gave them. Everyone in your group will have scored the same grants.
CLICK The potential dates of the discussions are highlighted on the calendar here, and they are December 10-14, and December If we have not yet scheduled your review group, please try to stay free on these days. We understand that this is slightly different than what we put on the website, but we hope we can plan some meetings for these days. Your discussion with your panel will probably take about half of the day.

20. If you ever need more information
If you ever want more information on the grants, the best place to look is the Allies in Self-Advocacy Website. The address is alliesinselfadvocacy.org
For those of you who participated in the summits, this is the same website. It still holds some information from the summits and other information about self-advocacy.

21. Questions More Questions:
Liz Weintraub – or ext. 212
Anna Costalas– or ext. 226
And now we will open the line for questions.
Once the line is open, everyone will be able to hear everyone else. If you have background noise, please mute yourself by pressing star then pound on your phone. You can unmute yourself using the same buttons.
Again, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact Anna or Liz at AUCD.