R.A.T.E.S. Foundation: The Beginning

WHY WE ESTABLISHED THE R.A.T.E.S. DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
I found that even though I understood the mechanics of grant proposal writing, I felt distressed with getting funds to do a project that I really did not want to do. At the same time I felt that people who really wanted to work in a particular area should know how to get the funds and resources needed to be successful. I wanted to develop a program to get financial support for what I felt led to do rather than just do something because money was being offered for it.

I also realized that organizations that tried to stay afloat on their own had a difficult time. But those that were connected with other productive organizations helped each other to sustain. I concluded that in order to launch and sustain a results driven organization, we needed to partner with others. We needed to have other contributors who would know how to tap into their own resources for the good of overall success. We also needed to know how to work together to serve common clients while realizing that each organization is needed in order to see success. In other words we needed to enhance our ability to succeed by working together.

However, most of the organizations did not know how to work with others. Many were not certain about what they offered or what they needed. They still required help with defining themselves so that they could assess and utilize their own resources. We did not have a “user friendly” instrument that could help us to understand ourselves. We also lacked the ability to communicate what our needs and assets in order to service our mutual clients.

R.A.T.E.S. Development proved to be a valuable tool for first getting participants to have a universally understood platform for a standard of assessment, planning and operation. We could be confident that those organizations that understand and operate according to the R.A.T.E.S. principles would at least have a foundation that we could all build upon.

R.A.T.E.S. Development principles compartmentalize non-profit practices into a foundation that can be easily referenced. These foundational practices establish a comprehensive platform for building instruction and measurement tools. As a standard of operations R.A.T.E.S. allows for easy transference of knowledge and organization mentoring. An added benefit of teaching the R.A.T.E.S principles is that we could also communicate our practices according to the language of R.A.T.E.S. to help determine where each participating organization would fit into each other’s efforts. In other words the language of the R.A.T.E.S. platform made collaboration easier to establish and monitor.