7.26.05

Started searching websites for grant info.

7.27.05

Found a few good grants that may be applicable from NSF and NASA.

7.28.05

Emailed Ray regarding making contacts with the Chabot Space & Science Center for possible partnership. Read more in-depth about grant options.

7.29.05

Received reply from Ray who suggested we contact James since he thought that former students had partnered before with Chabot.

8.1.05 - 8.2.05

Began searching for corporate grants. Found the IDEAS grant which sounds ideal.

8.4.05 - 8.5.05

Continued searching for corporate and government grants.

8.26.05

Looking for advice from Conspiritus earlier in the week on tracking sensor technology, we discovered that Steve Kearsley works for the Exploratorium. While he couldn't give us much with regard to partnership opportunities or sensor specifics, he provided a few tracking ideas to build upon.

9.7.05

Far behind, we begin to seriously look at the grant deadlines, eligibility, and requirements for application. The deadline for the IDEAS grant we'd bookmarked had already passed some time ago. Most have. The others will not award to individuals--just organizations. We need a partner but are quickly giving up hope on getting suggestions from CSU faculty on who might be receptive. We don't feel like we have the time to "cold call" those we're interested in, and budget/content-wise it is starting to look like we could pull off a good project without a partner or external funding source.

9.8.05

We decided to try to search around for foundation grants and such that WILL make awards to individuals (or through schools). We found a few but their deadlines had also passed. I thought this might be the case initially where we would have had to apply in the Spring to get funded for the following year but it would have been problematic to apply for a grant at that time since we had not broken up into project teams and had no project to propose yet. Most of the "multimedia" grants we found seemed to also only target film projects. Our program 9and project's) particular niche seems to be a hard area to find funding for. We pretty much agree at this point that we're pretty much on our own with regard to funding.