This Operational Analysis is an overall description of how New York University's Green Grants Program is functioning, including how well the program supports its stakeholders, grantees, staff and how the program is being managed by the Office. It ends with recommendations for the Program’s continued use, modification, and improvement. This particular report covers the entire lifespan of the Green Grant Program from its inception in 2007 to current operations in 2011.

The Green Grants Program offers grants of up to $20,000 to any member of the campus community for projects that improve operational environmental performance, foster eco-literacy and community engagement, advance applied research goals, or demonstrate the viability of best practices and technologies at the university. This analysis includs a comparison of similar programs across the United States and an internal analysis of the characteristics of projects that tend to succeed or tend to fail, a survey of successful, failed, and in-progress grants, and a survey of both grantees and the staff that deal with grantees.

Our findings include characteristics of successful and failed grants, such as grantee team make-up, project type and budget attributes. Some findings dispel myths, such as the assumption that undergraduate-led grants have lower completion rates than faculty-led grants. We explain how and why some of our trends occur against national averages, such as our tendency to have grants with larger budgets succeed more often than those with smaller budgets. The analysis includes administration-side improvements that nearly doubled our completion rates in the past year, including changes in staffing and the use of extensions. Finally, we make recommendations to avoid Selection Committee burn out, increase completion rates, and to solidifiy the institutionalization of projects.

Overall, NYU's Green Grants Program has improved remarkably in the past year and is expected to continue on this path. This analysis will continue that trend, and provides insight into the successes and failures of the program for other campus greening programs in the United States and Canada.