Grant Writing Confidential

Seliger + Associates works with the full spectrum of nonprofits, from newly minted ones to some that have been providing services for 150 years (this is not an exaggeration, as we have one client in Chicago that was formed in the 1860s). We’ve seen how nonprofits morph with respect to their grant writing opinions and [...]

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In 2008, I wrote a pair of long blog posts about the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program and what happens when a program that is nominally based on “research” has an unfortunate problem: the best available research shows the premise of the program is unlikely to succeed. (The first post is “What to do When Research [...]

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Is it really love if she only comes back for $300 an hour? Is it really a partnership if one person holds a gun to the other’s head? Does Microsoft really care about your business when they’ve kept you on hold for an hour, listening to aggravating muzak, only to tell you that they won’t [...]

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EDIT: The RFP has finally been issued—two months a day after this post was first published. The Department of Education will issue an RFP for the Race to the Top-District (RTTT-D) program around July 1. There will be about $400 million up for grabs. Local Education Agencies (“LEAs,” which is education-speak for school districts) with [...]

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The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) recently issued a Funding Opportunity Announcement (“FOA,” which is HRSA-speak for RFP) for the Service Area Competition (SAC) program. This program provides extremely valuable (for reasons we’ll explain in this post) five-year grants to operate one or more Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). There are three ways to [...]

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* A college diploma isn’t worth what it used to be. To get hired, grads today need hard skills. * Let’s play “Count the Acronym” in this sentence, from the ACF’s Transitional Living Program and Maternity Group Homes: “The Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB) is accepting applications for the Transitional Living Program (TLP) and [...]

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As a companion piece to Jake’s post on YouthBuild and Isaac’s on formatting, I want to explain the science of proposal production. 1. It starts, like all aspects of grant writing and preparation, with a thorough reading of the RFP. Failing to read the RFP is the equivalent of failing to check your boat for [...]

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