Grant Writing Confidential

Hot on the trail of yesterday’s post about L.A. gangs and statistics, the New York Times published “Los Angeles Combating Gangs Gone International.” It begins: Two gangs that originated on the streets here have grown so large in El Salvador that there are two prisons in that country devoted exclusively to their members, one for [...]

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As Isaac wrote, it almost never hurts to claim gang activity in a proposed service area (“[. . . f]ind and call the police unit responsible for gang suppression in your target area, then ask leading questions. Invariably, the officer will tell horror stories about rampant gang activity.”). Now, by way of Freakonomics, I found [...]

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Almost every grant proposal requires some form of needs assessment. More or less, the sentiment one must get across it that “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine,” as REM says. Essentially, the object is to make problems look overwhelming, but solvable with just a dollop of grant [...]

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* You may want to read this post from The Wealth Report in the Wall Street Journal, which details supposed changes in the way the rich give or the way they want to give. It’s light on detail but worth pondering: Today, at the peak of the charity season and the height of the wealth [...]

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In Part I of Studio Executives, Starlets, and Funding, I began by responding to a commenter who said, “I cannot shake the observation that to get a grant you must tell people with the money what they want to hear [...] But there seems to be no objective criteria by which these grants are awarded [...]

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In William Goldman’s hilarious Adventures in the Screen Trade*, he wrote, “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody knows how much money a movie will make or which movies should be made or what audiences want. Goldman cites movies a studio thought were a sure thing and flopped, and movies every studio but one rejected, only to see [...]

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Jake’s post on Zombie Funding got me thinking about my favorite Zombie program, the Urban Parks and Recreation Recovery (UPARR) program. This oddball program emerged in 1978 during the Carter administration and was supposed to link economic development with park development, a curious combination even by federal standards. In 1979, I wrote the first two [...]

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