Project Application Questionnaire

How the fund planned to evaluate projects: fact-finding, financial, impact, and alignment questions. A useful template for any community project preparing to raise.

Project application questionnaire

Archival document (2020–21), still useful today. This is the questionnaire we designed for projects applying to the fund. If you're a community project preparing to raise capital from anyone, answering these questions is excellent preparation. Part of the Fund Archive.

Phase I: Preliminary fact-finding

About the project

  • What is the nature of your project? Brief description, including any deeper purpose behind it.
  • Location of the property (map link; plans if available).
  • How much will it cost?
  • What is the revenue stream (or streams)?
  • What purpose does the project serve, and how does it connect to wiser, weller and more mindful living?

About you

We're partnering with you too!

  • Who are you? What experience do you bring to the project?
  • Will you be managing the project directly?
  • Where does your interest in wise/community living come from? For how long have you been practising?

Phase II: Detailed assessment

General

  • Maps and pictures of the property
  • Site map (1:500)
  • Current land register statement
  • Legal construction situation and community planning status (permissions, use and development plan)

Financial

  • The purchase price
  • Your business model: income streams; overheads, expenses and anticipated completion costs; market rent for an equivalent local property; estimated market value
  • Your plan B: alternative uses of the property should the project fail (holiday let, long-term let, resale…)
  • Appreciation data for comparable properties in the area
  • Do you have a guarantor in the event you can't pay rent?
  • Any existing debts on the property?
  • Do you, the initiators, have a financial stake? Will you be members of the community you create?
  • Proof of concept: where has something similar succeeded?
  • Proof of funds

Impact

  • How many people will it benefit directly? How deeply?
  • Is there benefit beyond the community itself — surrounding communities, ecological sustainability?
  • Is the activity part of a larger vision or effort at systems change?
  • How do you intend to make the community sustainable?
  • Your track record of successfully executing projects.

Alignment and cultural fit

  • The intention of the project, in one sentence.
  • The culture, ethos, or set of practices you intend to establish — and do they apply to the project's management as well?
  • Do you, the initiators, have a practice concerning living well? What is your story concerning alternative living?

Reference: Edith Maryon Foundation's checklist

We drew on the project-collaboration requirements of the Edith Maryon Foundation, which asks for: detailed project description and concept; presentation of initiators; statutes and annual reports; cost and financing concept with proof of own funds; land register statement; 1:500 site map; construction/planning status; building insurance; market value estimate; maps and pictures; current rental schedule.

From the Fund Archive. The archive also contains a worked example of this questionnaire applied to a real property analysis.