1972—A 21-year-old kid who’d taken a few Saul Alinsky-style courses in community organizing found himself as a Community Organizing Intern working in North Minneapolis, the mostly Black neighborhood in which he grew up, for the Minneapolis Housing and Redevelopment Authority. His supervisor, Helen Starkweather (who may or may not have been related to the better known Charlie Starkweather), a former AFDC mom and new careerist, let him loose to work on any of the manifold problems in the community.
After conducting a survey of the dozens of vacant and abandoned houses, a problem that existed long before the current subprime meltdown, he decided to ask the Willard-Homewood Organization (incredibly, WHO is still active) for an okay to set up a Vacant Housing Task Force. This led to a series of home improvement seminars and the realization that there were no local hardware stores, making it difficult to even find the tools and supplies necessary to repair homes. What to do? Aha, set up a cooperative hardware store. He asked around and was told, form a nonprofit organization and get some grant funds. He didn’t know what a grant was, but blasted ahead, formed the nonprofit and wrote a grant proposal that was funded for $5,000—big money in 1972 and enough to get the operation going.
The naive young man was of course me, and I thought this grant writing thing was pretty easy. After decamping to LA on a cold morning the following January in my rusted-out ’65 VDub by taking Route 66 (yeah, I stayed in Flagstaff and I didn’t forget Winona), I learned the hard way that there is more to successful grant writing than passion. Thirty-five years later, I’m still honing my skills. But I’ll never feel better about the universe than when I picked up that check from an aging 1930s radical who was a manager at the funder, Farmer’s Union Central Exchange, a producer cooperative long since merged into an energy conglomerate. This old guy in a conservative suit knew another radical when he saw one and was delighted to once again be stirring things up. I’ve long lost my radical ideals, but I still love crafting the small stories that are the stuff of successful grant writing.
I’ll be posting thoughts about grant writing, including tips, anecdotes and random observations about this most unusual occupation, based on my long journey and more proposals written than I like to think about. Posts from my son, Jake, who grew up with grant writing, will probably offer a less cynical and considerably less grizzled view.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Ben Scott // Dec 3, 2007 at 10:02 am
Gentlemen: Looking forward to what you will share in the days ahead. I have benefitted greatly from your website and incidentals so far. Thank you, and keep up the good work.
Ben Scott, Ph.D.
Regional Coordinator
Northern Dauphin Revitalization Project, Inc.
http://www.NDRCC.org/Revi
2 Terre // Dec 3, 2007 at 10:04 am
Can you add a feed link so people can sign up to be notified when you post a new article?
Thank you, happy holidays!
Terre
3 Jake Seliger // Dec 3, 2007 at 10:38 am
Ben — Thanks for your encouragement!
Terre — I’ll look into a notification link. In the meantime, there’s an “RSS” link just above the banner on the right side. See this page for how RSS works. I use a program call NetNewsWire.
4 James B. McSwain // Dec 3, 2007 at 11:13 am
When I read on the BLOG about grant writing, I cannot shake the observation that to get a grant you must tell people with the money what they want to hear. I find that to be an ethical problem. I am an historian, and I write proposals all the time for small amounts of travel money. But there seems to be no objective criteria by which these grants are awarded, other than to try and have the same number of women and men recipients. So someone is telling the
5 Katherine // Dec 4, 2007 at 7:59 am
Isaac and Jake - thank you both for your generosity in sharing the true “ups-and-downs” of the art of grant proposal writing. As a proposal writing specialist who came into this passion in mid-life and after a disability limited my full-time work capabilites. It’s great to hear that after 35 years, you still have the love of writing a well-honed proposal. I agree with the other comments, that I would like to somehow be flagged with an email when a new entry is posted. While I am extraordinarily busy, your site has been useful in the past. I would truly enjoy benefiting from both Isaac’s wisdom and Jake’s fresh insights. Thanks again.
6 Dick Dillon // Dec 4, 2007 at 9:04 am
Issac, I don’t know if you have given up your radical ideals or not, but as a “grizzled veteran ” of social activism myself I would say that the mere fact that you know what a blog is, much less have one of your own puts you in the top 1/2% of senior individuals in our field who are adopting the new technologies to further our goals. That’s pretty radical!
I look forward to more from both of you.
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