Anytime we take on a task that affects our community, we strive to complete it thoroughly, thoughtfully and to the best of our ability. At the St. Louis County Children’s Service Fund, we are charged with responsibly distributing tax dollars to organizations that provide mental and behavioral health funding for kids and their families in St. Louis County. It’s a job we take very seriously because we’re using public dollars, and our community deserves the best supports available.
Right now, our team is in the midst of reviewing more than 150 applications requesting a total of over $237 million for our 2026-2029 Core Funding Opportunity. As we shared in our last blog post, these numbers are new record highs for us, which makes this job of reviewing and awarding contracts as difficult as ever.
So, what goes into this process? How do we get from application review to final funding decisions?
Our team has been working for several months to fine-tune our review process to ensure it is as fair, equitable, and streamlined as possible. In this post, we’ll explain what goes into our review process to get us to final awards and contract offers, which will happen in spring 2026.
Hiring Community Reviewers
Before our application even opened, our team was preparing to review applications. One of the most important components of this was recruiting and hiring community members to join us in reviewing proposals.
We feel it’s crucial to a fair and equitable funding review process to include members of the community who have personal and/or professional experience in mental and behavioral health care. They bring important knowledge and perspective around what services are needed most in our community.
Earlier this year, we promoted this opportunity and received more than 200 applications. We extended offers to more than 30 individuals. Learn more about the role of community reviewers in a previous blog post.
Checking Our Biases at the Door
We know that biases – conscious or not – play a role in how we show up in various spaces of our lives. Our staff members and community reviewers are all human beings with unique backgrounds and experiences that impact how they view and navigate the world.
Before we begin reviewing proposals, our entire staff and all community reviewers go through bias training. We discuss different types of biases and explore how they might affect our views or initial thoughts on a proposal. Our goal is to be aware of what biases we might hold so we can recognize when they could unfairly impact our assessment of funding applications.
A Team Approach to Reviewing
Receiving more than 150 funding applications makes it near impossible for every team member or community reviewer to assess every application. To manage the workload, we break up into teams. Each team is led by a CSF staff member and assigned a group of approximately 20-25 proposals to review. Over the next month, our review teams will read and score proposals using a standardized scorecard and meet to discuss their thoughts. After all proposals are scored, review team leads will summarize feedback and make note of any additional information we need to fully understand a proposal.
Initial Thoughts and Clarifications
After all reviewer feedback is summarized, we begin the decision-making process. To start, we divide applications into two buckets – those that reviewers agreed were a good fit for our funding, and those that need further discussion. Together, we discuss those that fall into the second bucket to find clarity on whether the proposed program is a good fit for our funding.
In some cases, proposals in either bucket may require clarification to fully understand how requested funds would be used or to determine an appropriate award amount. When this happens, we reach out to applicants with targeted questions. Not all applicants will be asked for clarifications, and being asked for clarifications is not a sign of whether CSF is likely to award funding or not.
For proposed programs that CSF has not funded before, our team may conduct a site visit as part of the review process. This is typically an in-person visit—ideally at the location where services will be delivered—to learn more about the program and the organization’s approach. Site visits are conducted only when they meaningfully support the review process, so not all applicants will participate in this step. Applicants of programs we currently partner with will not receive an additional visit, as they have already participated in site visits through their existing contracts.
Finalizing Funding Decisions
Once we’ve collected clarifications and made site visits, it’s time to finalize recommendations to share with our board of directors. We gather again as a team to discuss final thoughts and then compile all recommendations into one document and share it with our board members.
The last step in the application review process is a final meeting with our board of directors, who make the final decisions about funding. With this meeting scheduled for spring 2026, we have a lot of work ahead of us over the next few months.
As we work toward these final funding decisions, we are committed to reviewing every funding proposal with fairness and care. We understand the work that goes into each submission, and we strive to ensure our review process reflects that same thoughtfulness. We’re excited to continue learning about the wonderful work happening in children’s behavioral health in St. Louis County and look forward to the partnerships we’ll gain from this process.