Category Archives: grant

Grant Writing Success – A Non-Profit Walmart State Grant

Non-profit consultant and expert grant writer Derek Link shares a grant writing success story:

A couple of years ago I was contracted to write some grants for a non-profit organization named Challenge Aspen in Colorado. My grant research led me to the Walmart Foundation’s State grant program and I was soon on my way to a grant writing success story.

The grant proposal we submitted secured a grant of $30,000 to support an important outdoor Challenge Aspen Military Options (CAMO) program for disabled female veterans. The program supports courageous women striving to re-build their lives after being disabled in the wars.

There were a number of important factors that contributed to this grant writing success:

  1. Challenge Aspen does great work and documents what they do.
  2. Challenge Aspen has a staff and a budget which ensured the work would get done that the $30,000 was targeted for.
  3. There was a clear mission and measurable objectives for the proposal.
  4. Challenge Aspen staff provided the documents I needed in a timely way and they gave me excellent feedback to ensure that the narrative accurately reflected the needs of the program.
  5. Challenge Aspen had a competent grant writer (moi!)

Each grant writing success story involves a partnership between a functional non profit organization and an expert grant writer. It is always a joy to write for a non profit that is dedicated to its mission and can prove its effectiveness!

—————————–

Improve your grant writing by looking at some successful grant samples.

Want more grant writing tools?  Become a member of GrantGoddess.com!

Free webinar – Grant Writing Tips


What is a Grant Writer?

Non-Profit Consultant and Expert Grant Writer, Derek Link, answers the question “What is a Grant Writer?” in his own unique way:

So many times, in response to the standard “guy” question, “So, what do you do?” I get this deer in the headlights response to my answer, “I’m a grant writer.”  The predictable follow-up question is, “Really?  What’s a grant writer?” 

Most people (not all) have heard of grants but most people think it’s a gift-wrapped gold bar that Uncle Sam sends out to undeserving people who make obscene artwork.  So I explain what a grant is first.
What is a grant?

Basically, a grant is an effort on the part of the government to solve a problem, improve a condition, demonstrate the validity of an idea, and sometimes – it’s true (I wish it weren’t) – pay back a political favor. 
The government goes about this by organizing a grant competition.  This competition is assigned a budget and the size of the grants is usually pre-determined, and so the budget allocated to the program determines the number of grants to be given out.  Applications are developed and made available, deadlines for submission of applications are set, and criteria for scoring the applications are created. 
When all of the applications come in, they are sorted and checked to make sure the writers followed all the rules, those that did not are tossed into the trash can and the rest are scored.  The highest scores win the dough, everyone else gets zilch and has to wait for another round of competition.
What is a grant writer?

After I get the person to understand what a grant is, then they often must be helped to understand what the application entails.  This is when in the conversation they glaze over and their minds stray off into “I like pizza” mode.  So I usually cut it short with “A grant writer writes the applications for grants,” which is really all they wanted to know and more than they wanted to know all at the same time.
Guys usually ask you what you do because they’re trying to gauge your level of success to see if you’re someone they can relate to, aspire to be like or perhaps give a dollar to.  But being told that someone is a grant writer is impossible to quantify. 
Being a doctor or a lawyer implies one is making a substantial income but a grant writer is such an unknown that people who care about that stuff – and guys often do – really have a hard time wrapping their head around what it means.
I like that part of being an inscrutable grant writer, apparently savvy about the mysterious inner-workings of government, apparently owning the ability to help others access a trickle of the government wealth, and having an occupation with no common point of reference with which to determine my income level. 
I am a Grant Writer. With this title, I can remain somewhat of a social-class enigma at events and social functions (at least until I go out to the parking lot and fire up my ’97 Honda Civic).

—————————————–

Free Letter of Inquiry Outline

Free webinar on Writing Good Letters of Support for Grants

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

What is a Grant Writer?

Non-Profit Consultant and Expert Grant Writer, Derek Link, answers the question “What is a Grant Writer?” in his own unique way:

So many times, in response to the standard “guy” question, “So, what do you do?” I get this deer in the headlights response to my answer, “I’m a grant writer.”  The predictable follow-up question is, “Really?  What’s a grant writer?” 

Most people (not all) have heard of grants but most people think it’s a gift-wrapped gold bar that Uncle Sam sends out to undeserving people who make obscene artwork.  So I explain what a grant is first.
What is a grant?
Basically, a grant is an effort on the part of the government to solve a problem, improve a condition, demonstrate the validity of an idea, and sometimes – it’s true (I wish it weren’t) – pay back a political favor. 
The government goes about this by organizing a grant competition.  This competition is assigned a budget and the size of the grants is usually pre-determined, and so the budget allocated to the program determines the number of grants to be given out.  Applications are developed and made available, deadlines for submission of applications are set, and criteria for scoring the applications are created. 
When all of the applications come in, they are sorted and checked to make sure the writers followed all the rules, those that did not are tossed into the trash can and the rest are scored.  The highest scores win the dough, everyone else gets zilch and has to wait for another round of competition.
What is a grant writer?
After I get the person to understand what a grant is, then they often must be helped to understand what the application entails.  This is when in the conversation they glaze over and their minds stray off into “I like pizza” mode.  So I usually cut it short with “A grant writer writes the applications for grants,” which is really all they wanted to know and more than they wanted to know all at the same time.
Guys usually ask you what you do because they’re trying to gauge your level of success to see if you’re someone they can relate to, aspire to be like or perhaps give a dollar to.  But being told that someone is a grant writer is impossible to quantify. 
Being a doctor or a lawyer implies one is making a substantial income but a grant writer is such an unknown that people who care about that stuff – and guys often do – really have a hard time wrapping their head around what it means.
I like that part of being an inscrutable grant writer, apparently savvy about the mysterious inner-workings of government, apparently owning the ability to help others access a trickle of the government wealth, and having an occupation with no common point of reference with which to determine my income level. 
I am a Grant Writer. With this title, I can remain somewhat of a social-class enigma at events and social functions (at least until I go out to the parking lot and fire up my ’97 Honda Civic).

—————————————–

Free Letter of Inquiry Outline

Free webinar on Writing Good Letters of Support for Grants

Federal Government Grant Priorities…..Whose Priorities?

I was scanning the grant opportunities at grants.gov this morning, and I noticed something that I have noticed for years, but today it struck me a bit differently. I’m accustomed to seeing hundreds of grant opportunities that don’t apply to my clients.  Many are amusing (I’ve posted on Facebook about competitions for funds to save particular obscure animal species, etc.) and some are just incomprehensible. However, at a time when our economy is in trouble and people are suffering, some of the federal grant priorities seem just wrong.

Non-profit organizations that are often the last line of support for our most needy citizens are struggling for every dime these days, yet here are just a few of the hundreds of things that the government is choosing to fund instead:

Inventory of Cave Dwelling Animals in Wet Caves Grant – I think we could just go with last year’s inventory numbers, don’t you?

Azerbaijan New Media Project – This is $4,000,000 to support the development of new media and online communities in Azerbaijan. Supposedly it will help with the distribution of US aide there.

Establishing a Global System of Regional Wildlife Networks: Providing Support for Central American Wildlife – Wildlife here are so well protected that we have extra cash to be protecting wildlife in Central America?

Mexican Spotted Owl Grant – This announcement lists only “Mexican Spotted Owl” in the full description of the project.  Are we buying a Mexican spotted owl?  Several? Are we protecting it? Feeding it? Whatever we are doing to it, is it more important than $280,000 worth of food for the homeless?

Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya – $14,000,000 for this one, folks. I guess all of the youth in the US are empowered and well-educated, so it’s time to move on the youth of Kenya.

Decentralization Enabling Environment – I find this one to be particularly ironic. This grant provides $2,000,000 to a nongovernmental agency in Honduras to help develop the “environment necessary for decentralization of government services to the local level in order to better respond to citizen needs.” At a time when local organizations in the U.S. that do this very thing are suffering and the U.S. is going through a dramatic centralization of services and resources, we’re giving money to another country to do the opposite.

MERIDA Small Grant Program for Community Youth at Risk – This one is for community-based programs for at-risk youth in Panama. See my comment above about the Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am sure that there is some value in each of these programs. What kind of human being would I be if I didn’t think doing something to or with Mexican Spotted Owls was important or that we shouldn’t have an accurate inventory of wet cave dwelling animals?

Even so, I think we need to do a much better job of prioritizing.  Every family knows that you can’t have everything. Some things that you think are important have to be put aside or postponed until you can afford them in favor of funding things that are much more important.

As for the grants I just cited (and the hundreds of others like them), just whose priorities are those, anyway?

—————————————-

Click here to access two free webinars on the Basics of Program Evaluation.

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Federal Government Grant Priorities…..Whose Priorities?

I was scanning the grant opportunities at grants.gov this morning, and I noticed something that I have noticed for years, but today it struck me a bit differently. I’m accustomed to seeing hundreds of grant opportunities that don’t apply to my clients.  Many are amusing (I’ve posted on Facebook about competitions for funds to save particular obscure animal species, etc.) and some are just incomprehensible. However, at a time when our economy is in trouble and people are suffering, some of the federal grant priorities seem just wrong.

Non-profit organizations that are often the last line of support for our most needy citizens are struggling for every dime these days, yet here are just a few of the hundreds of things that the government is choosing to fund instead:

Inventory of Cave Dwelling Animals in Wet Caves Grant – I think we could just go with last year’s inventory numbers, don’t you?

Azerbaijan New Media Project – This is $4,000,000 to support the development of new media and online communities in Azerbaijan. Supposedly it will help with the distribution of US aide there.

Establishing a Global System of Regional Wildlife Networks: Providing Support for Central American Wildlife – Wildlife here are so well protected that we have extra cash to be protecting wildlife in Central America?

Mexican Spotted Owl Grant – This announcement lists only “Mexican Spotted Owl” in the full description of the project.  Are we buying a Mexican spotted owl?  Several? Are we protecting it? Feeding it? Whatever we are doing to it, is it more important than $280,000 worth of food for the homeless?

Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya – $14,000,000 for this one, folks. I guess all of the youth in the US are empowered and well-educated, so it’s time to move on the youth of Kenya.

Decentralization Enabling Environment – I find this one to be particularly ironic. This grant provides $2,000,000 to a nongovernmental agency in Honduras to help develop the “environment necessary for decentralization of government services to the local level in order to better respond to citizen needs.” At a time when local organizations in the U.S. that do this very thing are suffering and the U.S. is going through a dramatic centralization of services and resources, we’re giving money to another country to do the opposite.

MERIDA Small Grant Program for Community Youth at Risk – This one is for community-based programs for at-risk youth in Panama. See my comment above about the Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am sure that there is some value in each of these programs. What kind of human being would I be if I didn’t think doing something to or with Mexican Spotted Owls was important or that we shouldn’t have an accurate inventory of wet cave dwelling animals?

Even so, I think we need to do a much better job of prioritizing.  Every family knows that you can’t have everything. Some things that you think are important have to be put aside or postponed until you can afford them in favor of funding things that are much more important.

As for the grants I just cited (and the hundreds of others like them), just whose priorities are those, anyway?

—————————————-

Click here to access two free webinars on the Basics of Program Evaluation.

How Positive Writing Makes a Better Grant

Yesterday on my Twitter account (Grant_Writer if you want to follow me) I received a tweet from someone I won’t name and the gist of the tweet was that this person was watching a single Mom struggling on a teacher’s salary to put a child through college – “sigh”.

Well, I thought this warped perspective must have some relevance or I wouldn’t have been meant to see it. Before pondering the significance of this to grant writing, I replied to the person’s tweet something to the effect that the person is indeed fortunate to be “struggling” with a “salary” (of any kind in this economy) and a “child in college” (what a great burden). Life could be so much worse.

Grants must be written from a perspective of abundance and positive energy. While there may well be some difficult circumstances that caused the grant to be needed, like extremely low reading levels among 4th grade students, or hunger and homelessness, or whatever the need may be, the reader wants to hear about the hope the grant provides for overcoming those circumstances. The reader wants to believe that your grant will resolve those issues, and that you are confident and competent to accomplish the objectives.

Writing that presents a “woe-is-me” attitude simply makes me want to jump off a bridge. I may well sympathize with the needs presented, and usually this is the strongest section of even a bad grant because most everyone can point out what’s wrong. But pointing out what is right that will lead to a positive outcome is the key.

Take my twitter “followee” as an example. This person could have tweeted something like, “So proud of my friend putting her child through college on a teacher’s salary-hurrah!” – Or – “My friend’s struggle to put her child through college on a teacher’s salary will pay off! She’s my hero!”

It’s all in the perspective, so choose to write grant narratives in a positive tone, one that promotes your energy, that clearly illustrates your fresh ideas, and that forcefully expresses confidence in your competent ability to overcome the current reality and create a better tomorrow!

By Non-Profit Consultant and Expert Grant Writer Derek Link

—————————-

Check out some grant samples at http://grantsample.com/ .

How Positive Writing Makes a Better Grant

Yesterday on my Twitter account (Grant_Writer if you want to follow me) I received a tweet from someone I won’t name and the gist of the tweet was that this person was watching a single Mom struggling on a teacher’s salary to put a child through college – “sigh”.

Well, I thought this warped perspective must have some relevance or I wouldn’t have been meant to see it. Before pondering the significance of this to grant writing, I replied to the person’s tweet something to the effect that the person is indeed fortunate to be “struggling” with a “salary” (of any kind in this economy) and a “child in college” (what a great burden). Life could be so much worse.

Grants must be written from a perspective of abundance and positive energy. While there may well be some difficult circumstances that caused the grant to be needed, like extremely low reading levels among 4th grade students, or hunger and homelessness, or whatever the need may be, the reader wants to hear about the hope the grant provides for overcoming those circumstances. The reader wants to believe that your grant will resolve those issues, and that you are confident and competent to accomplish the objectives.

Writing that presents a “woe-is-me” attitude simply makes me want to jump off a bridge. I may well sympathize with the needs presented, and usually this is the strongest section of even a bad grant because most everyone can point out what’s wrong. But pointing out what is right that will lead to a positive outcome is the key.

Take my twitter “followee” as an example. This person could have tweeted something like, “So proud of my friend putting her child through college on a teacher’s salary-hurrah!” – Or – “My friend’s struggle to put her child through college on a teacher’s salary will pay off! She’s my hero!”

It’s all in the perspective, so choose to write grant narratives in a positive tone, one that promotes your energy, that clearly illustrates your fresh ideas, and that forcefully expresses confidence in your competent ability to overcome the current reality and create a better tomorrow!

By Non-Profit Consultant and Expert Grant Writer Derek Link

—————————-

Check out some grant samples at http://grantsample.com/ .

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Happily Slogging On!

Here are some thoughts from Non-Profit Consultant and Expert Grant Writer, Derek Link, on focus and perseverance:

Doing something difficult is always a trial of wills. You must enforce your will over the task, and over all other competing tasks. You must make a commitment that the task at hand is the one that matters most, and devote your focus on it entirely through the inevitably arduous march toward completion.

I’ve experienced this happy slog over and over in my life. Fortunately I got good advice about the slog along the way, and actually before I even began my first one (the university). I had a wonderful teacher in high school named Norm Barker. He was an architecture teacher and a terrifically talented person. He could do anything with his hands. I admired him because of those skills, and he was actually in my neighborhood so I got to see some of his handiwork first hand. He rebuilt a 1961 Porsche from paint to engine to upholstery, he built his own stereo speakers, he took an old wood-burning pot-bellied stove that he’d found in a field and welded up all the bullet holes and recast the missing parts and it was a thing of beauty when he finished.

What Mr. Barker taught me, in addition to some drafting skills, was that dedication to an endeavor produced good results. I recall that he was inspiring me to become an architect at one point as a student and he showed me a list of the courses at Cal Poly I’d need to take to become an architect. I remarked to him that I wasn’t good at math (truth be told, in high school I didn’t do my homework which mostly accounted for my poor math scores). He told me a valuable thing that sustained me throughout my Bachelor’s and my Master’s degrees: Mr. Barker said, “Derek, there’s nothing you can’t get through for one semester”. BRILLIANT ADVICE, Mr. Barker.

So, this is a long bird-walk to get to my topic of the Happy Slog. When you are in the midst of writing a grant and you’re feeling like you’ll never slog through it, just keep Mr. Barker’s advice in mind (with a little twist) “There’s nothing you can’t get through in three (fill in your deadline) weeks.” The deadline will come and go, so keep your mind focused and ignore all the competing distractions that are bound to come your way.

Slog on grant writers, slog on!

———————————-

Happily Slogging On!

Here are some thoughts from Non-Profit Consultant and Expert Grant Writer, Derek Link, on focus and perseverance:

Doing something difficult is always a trial of wills. You must enforce your will over the task, and over all other competing tasks. You must make a commitment that the task at hand is the one that matters most, and devote your focus on it entirely through the inevitably arduous march toward completion.

I’ve experienced this happy slog over and over in my life. Fortunately I got good advice about the slog along the way, and actually before I even began my first one (the university). I had a wonderful teacher in high school named Norm Barker. He was an architecture teacher and a terrifically talented person. He could do anything with his hands. I admired him because of those skills, and he was actually in my neighborhood so I got to see some of his handiwork first hand. He rebuilt a 1961 Porsche from paint to engine to upholstery, he built his own stereo speakers, he took an old wood-burning pot-bellied stove that he’d found in a field and welded up all the bullet holes and recast the missing parts and it was a thing of beauty when he finished.

What Mr. Barker taught me, in addition to some drafting skills, was that dedication to an endeavor produced good results. I recall that he was inspiring me to become an architect at one point as a student and he showed me a list of the courses at Cal Poly I’d need to take to become an architect. I remarked to him that I wasn’t good at math (truth be told, in high school I didn’t do my homework which mostly accounted for my poor math scores). He told me a valuable thing that sustained me throughout my Bachelor’s and my Master’s degrees: Mr. Barker said, “Derek, there’s nothing you can’t get through for one semester”. BRILLIANT ADVICE, Mr. Barker.

So, this is a long bird-walk to get to my topic of the Happy Slog. When you are in the midst of writing a grant and you’re feeling like you’ll never slog through it, just keep Mr. Barker’s advice in mind (with a little twist) “There’s nothing you can’t get through in three (fill in your deadline) weeks.” The deadline will come and go, so keep your mind focused and ignore all the competing distractions that are bound to come your way.

Slog on grant writers, slog on!

———————————-

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Grant Writing – Five Last Minute Things to Check

In the grant writing process, the final hours are the most stressful. That’s the time when you are conducting your final checks to make sure you have included everything that needs to be included, labeled everything correctly, corrected all errors, calculated everything correctly, and followed the instructions to the letter. It is also one of the most dangerous periods of the grant writing process because it’s easy to miss things in the rush to finish.

Here are a few last minute things to watch out for:

  1. Re-check all information on required forms. Go through all of the required forms, line by line, to make sure you entered the information correctly. It’s not uncommon to think that completing forms is so simple that you lose focus, and it’s easy to transpose numbers in phone numbers or enter email addresses or tax ID numbers incorrectly.
  2. Check all budget numbers – then check them again. Just like on your taxes, math errors are among the most common when completing grant application budgets.
  3. Review the program requirements and make sure they are all addressed (and labeled) in your narrative. If the program you are applying for has absolute and competitive preference priorities, be sure you have addressed them all and labeled your responses as such. Remember, you don’t want the readers to have any trouble at all finding your responses to program requirements.
  4. Fill in all blanks in your narrative. Sometimes people leave blanks in the narrative for page references or things they plan on filling in later. If you don’t go back through specifically looking for them, it’s easy to miss them.
  5. If you are submitting your grant electronically, open each section and to make sure the files are attached properly before you submit. I may be paranoid, but I always like to take one last look at every document before I click that “submit” button, just to be sure that the file I intended to attach is actually the one that was attached.

Successful grant writing is all about details. Taking a few extra minutes at the end of the grant writing process to check a few important details can make all the difference.

————————————-
 
Get a free dowload of our e-book, 12 Secrets of Successful Grant Writers.