PCC Community Excellence Grants

This is not a student scholarship

Thanks to an outstanding investment by philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott, the Community Excellent Grant Program at Pasadena City College helps elevate exceptional ideas that advance PCC’s mission, vision, and values.

PCC has established a reputation as an innovator and creative space for educating students. Our faculty, staff, and students uncover new ideas and best practices, and we make a practice of disseminating these to our colleagues and peer institutions. This grant program supercharges these innate qualities of our culture, providing seed funding and experimentation space to nurture, test, and scale up new projects and approaches to educating.

This grant program aims to find the best and most impactful ideas within our diverse community and give them the resources and energy to take root and grow. Programs funded with a Community Excellence Grant will be:
• In service to PCC’s students, faculty, and staff;
• Avenues for deepened connections between the college and communities across our district;
• Spaces for intentional enhancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion;
• Seen as signature demonstrations of PCC’s approach to education, pedagogy, and/or community college administration;
• Expected to demonstrate results within one year of the grant award;
• Designed to maximize the impact of a one-time grant through this program;
• Operated by PCC’s board policies and administrative procedures.

Please visit our website to learn more about the changes and updates for this year’s process – but a couple things to note:

1. We are moving from a 2-year cycle to a 1-year cycle
2. Applicants must use our budget template when submitting their budget
3. All grant applications must have a “reference” from either the Dean, Director, or VP involved with the project
4. For the 2025-2026 cycle, special consideration will be given to projects that address the current wildfire situation impacting our immediate community