A market recovery fund does one job. It closes the gap between a signatory contractor's number and the number that wins the work. When it lands, the job comes home union and your members go to work.
The size of the fund is rarely the problem. The calendar is.
The deadline is the whole game
A contractor decides whether to chase a job well before the bid is due, and they need to know what help is available while they are still putting the number together. If your approval arrives after the bid goes out, the money did nothing. The fund was never short. It was late.
That is worth being blunt about, because most locals judge their fund by what it paid out. The more useful number is how many days passed between a contractor asking and the local answering.
Where the days actually go
Walk your own process and count the handoffs. In most halls it runs about like this.
A contractor calls, and someone explains what to send. The request comes back by email, sometimes with the numbers in the body and sometimes buried in an attachment. Someone copies them into a spreadsheet that lives on one machine. Then it waits on a signature that has to happen in person, or at a meeting that has not come around yet. Once it clears, someone cuts the check and files the paperwork somewhere it can be found later, which is usually the weakest link in the whole chain.
No single step there is unreasonable. Added together, they routinely outlast the bid window.
Two things to check before you change anything
Pull your last five subsidies. Write down the date the contractor asked and the date the money was approved. If that spread is measured in weeks rather than days, the approval step is where you are losing bids, and no amount of additional funding fixes it.
Then pick one of those five and reconstruct it from scratch: the job, the contractor, the amount, who approved it, and when. If that takes more than a few minutes today, it will not be possible at all in three years, when a board member or an auditor asks.
Closing the gap
This is the work Market Recovery was built to run. Contractors submit a request online instead of assembling a packet. Staff review and approve online, without waiting for the next meeting to come around. The money moves out of your local's own bank account, and the record writes itself as it goes, so the job, the contractor, the approval, and the date are already there when someone asks for them.
Most locals start here, then bring member records and dues collection onto the same system once the fund is running.
If you take one thing from this, measure the days rather than the dollars. The dollars were not the reason you lost the bid.