Mini-grant Eligible Activities

View the Spring 2012 mini-grant application.

What types of activities are eligible for a mini-grant?

The National Center seeks mini-grant application proposals that fit a school’s identified needs and interests. In order to identify which changes the school would like to accomplish and determine which corresponding activities to propose, it is often helpful to engage a variety of student and adult leaders.

The National Center has outlined general categories and sample activities below to give applicants ideas about ways in which mini-grant funds can make a difference. These categories and ideas are only examples; we definitely want to see new, improved, and innovative ideas, needs, and interests. When thinking about what to propose, it may be helpful to answer the following question: 

At this school, we want to…

• Improve safety.  $1,000 could help to:

  • Start a safety patrol or club.
  • Work to increase safe driving in school zones and neighborhoods by addressing issues that could include reducing speeding, cell phone usage, texting, etc.
  • Provide age-appropriate walking/bicycling safety education, including hands-on and/or classroom activities.
  • Work to improve unappealing routes to school, which can address student and parental concerns about personal security.
  • [Insert your great idea here]

• Increase the number of students walking and bicycling to school.  $1,000 could help to:

  • Encourage peers and parents to find opportunities to walk or bicycle.
  • Some examples include social marketing campaigns and classroom and family discussions about transportation choices.
  • Engage students with disabilities by identifying and taking steps to resolve safe walking/bicycling accessibility issues.
  • Start a walking school bus, bicycle train, and/or a “Walking Buddies” program.
  • Use student-generated ideas about safe walking/bicycling to produce a student-led school assembly, “Dramatic Production” (also known as a play), or a video for viral distribution.
  • [Insert your great idea here]

• Emphasize physical activity and health.  $1,000 could help to:

  • Integrate safe walking and bicycling into the school’s broader Let’s Move initiative.
  • Connect the choice to walk/bicycle with better health.
  • Organize groups of students to walk or bicycle together as part of an after-school club. Club could also include bicycle maintenance activities.
  • Track mileage via pedometers.
  • [Insert your great idea here]

• Explore environmental concerns.  $1,000 could help to:

  • Connect the choice to walk/bicycle with helping the environment in general.
  • Explore the connection between active transportation and air quality.
  • Some example activities include implementing car-free Wednesdays, starting a “No Idling” campaign, demonstrating the difference between air quality emissions in the drop-off line versus a non-motor vehicle area, etc.
  • [Insert your great idea here]

• Contribute to an overall positive learning environment.  $1,000 could help to:

  • Contribute to students’ readiness to learn by tracking rates of absenteeism, tardiness, and/or in-school behavior in conjunction with active transportation to school.
  • Some example activities include tracking absenteeism/tardiness on walk-to-school days versus regular school days; working with students to connect in-school behavior and/or grades with opportunity to participate in after-school walking/bicycling club, ability to earn helmet/bicycle parts/bicycle, etc.
  • Collaborate with teachers to integrate walking and bicycling into the general curriculum (math, social studies, English, science, etc.).
  • [Insert your great idea here]

• Participate in civic discussion.  $1,000 could help to:

  • Develop and/or promote school or district policies which are supportive of safe walking and bicycling to school.
  • Interact with local officials via presentations, letters, videos, etc.
  • [Insert your great idea here]

In any of the above categories, using students’ service-learning projects or community service requirements can be additional ways to engage students in safe walking/bicycling activities while benefitting the broader school community.

The Let’s Move! campaign, started by First Lady Michelle Obama, has an ambitious national goal of solving the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight. Let’s Move! will combat the epidemic of childhood obesity through a comprehensive approach that will engage every sector impacting the health of children and will provide schools, families and communities simple tools to help kids be more active, eat better, and get healthy. The four pillars of the campaign are the following:

1. Empowering parents and caregivers
2. Providing healthy food in schools
3. Improving access to healthy, affordable foods
4. Increasing physical activity.

Two of these pillars – increasing physical activity, and empowering parents and caregivers – relate directly to safe walking and bicycling programs. Learn more about Let’s Move! at www.letsmove.gov.