Summary

  • ARIN’s current recipient page counts 18 applications for its 2026 Community Grant round and says two projects were selected. Draft minutes of the 18 August Board meeting say the committee selected two of ten applications; the minutes are still marked draft, and the Board approved the recommendations 10–0.
  • The program rules describe committee review of qualified applications followed by Board selection, but neither the rules nor the two public records explain whether “18” and “10” refer to different stages. The evidence cannot support a comparable selection rate or identify which count, if either, needs correction.

Analysis

Two official totals, one missing definition

ARIN’s current 2026 recipient page gives the grant round a clean headline: 18 applications, two projects selected. It also reports US$326,080 requested and US$37,350 provided. The names and summaries of the two funded projects are now public.

The Board’s 18 August minutes tell a different story about the pool. Under “Community Grant Program Update,” they say the selection committee chose two of ten applications. The same paragraph says these were the only two applications to receive grants “based on all the applications that were submitted.” The motion to fund them passed by a 10–0 roll-call vote.

One figure is consistent across the records: two grants. The denominator is not. Eighteen applications on the recipient page cannot be silently treated as the same pool as ten in the Board minutes. Nor can the difference be assigned to completeness, eligibility, qualification or scoring: the public materials do not say that ten were the qualified subset of eighteen.

There is a plausible institutional reason to expect different stages. ARIN’s program rules say the Grant Selection Committee reviews qualified applications, makes written recommendations, and the Board takes the final decision. But the rules do not map the recipient-page field “Applications” to a stage, and the minutes call ten the applications from which the committee selected. The sources leave open whether one count reflects submissions and the other a later stage, whether the two pages use different reporting cuts, or whether one figure is stale. Those are possibilities, not findings.

The distinction matters because an application count is not decorative context. It defines the apparent size of the opportunity and is often used to calculate a selection rate. Two out of ten would be 20 percent; two out of eighteen would be about 11 percent. Neither is a defensible programme rate unless the numerator and denominator refer to the same decision stage and the same application pool. Publishing both percentages without that qualification would turn an unresolved record gap into false precision.

The discrepancy also should not be inflated into a claim about the merits of the grants. The recipient page identifies two projects and gives their awards. ARIN’s rules set criteria around regional benefit, reach, impact, budget and likelihood of success. The count mismatch does not show that either project was improperly chosen, that other applicants were eligible, or that the committee or Board departed from its rules. The minutes remain a draft pending approval, a status that belongs beside any account of their contents.

ARIN says grant communications and deliberations are confidential. That does not require publishing proposals, applicant identities or reviewers’ discussions. A small public clarification could answer the narrower question: what stage does each aggregate count represent, and which figure should a reader use when describing the 2026 pool? If the counts measure different steps, labeling them would resolve the apparent contradiction without exposing individual applications. If one is wrong, a dated correction would preserve the record.

The useful next update is therefore not a reconstructed selection rate. It is a denominator definition attached to the existing summary. Until ARIN supplies one, the responsible account is simple: the recipient page says 18; the draft minutes say ten; both report two selections; the sources do not reconcile the counts.

Sources