Grant Writing Confidential

It seems that the Bard is always topical, and All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare’s “problem comedies” that may actually be a tragedy, comes to mind as an apropos title for a comedic tale that illustrates one of the many odd aspects of grant writing: why there is little reason to read comments [...]

[Read more →]

The Community Based Abstinence Education Program (CBAE—see the .pdf RFP at the link) from the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACF) is a complicated, confusing, and poorly designed RFP based on suspect premises. Given that, however, it’s an excellent case study in how to deal with a variety of grant writing problems that relate [...]

[Read more →]

* Imagine our surprise at seeing a client on the front page of CNN:
“AIDS in America today is a black disease,” says Phill Wilson, founder and CEO of the institute and himself HIV-positive for 20 years. “2006 CDC data tell us that about half of the just over 1 million Americans living with HIV or [...]

[Read more →]

A budding grant writer who is enrolled in a Nonprofit Management Masters program recently e-mailed me to ask if she should spend $4,000 on grant writing classes. Regular readers know how little I think of grant writing training, so I advised her to take some undergrad courses in English composition/journalism and spend her $4k on [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve talked before about RFP absurdity, and now I’ll talk about lunacy: the HRSA “Service Expansion in Mental Health/Substance Services, Oral Health and Comprehensive Pharmacy Services” program (see the RFP in a Word file here) asks in Section 2.6, “Applicant describes how oral health services will be provided for special populations, such as MSFWs, homeless [...]

[Read more →]

A faithful Grant Writing Confidential reader and fellow grant writer, Katherine, sent an email wanting my take on a public agency hiring a lobbying firm to seek federal earmarks. For those not familiar with the term, it means getting a member of Congress to slip a favored local project into a bill, bypassing normal reviews [...]

[Read more →]

RFP needs assessments will sometimes request data that aren’t readily available or just don’t exist. The question then becomes for you, the grant writer, what to do when caught between an RFP’s instructions and the reality of phantom data. When you can’t find it,
The Service Expansion in Mental Health/Substance Services, Oral Health and Comprehensive Pharmacy [...]

[Read more →]

Two comments on Credentials for Grant Writers—If I Only Had A Brain caught my attention: one is an elegantly written response challenging some aspects of my argument and the other a screechy attack.
In the first response, Marcia Ford agrees with my statements about “bogus credentials,” but defends the credential offered by the American Association of [...]

[Read more →]

Seliger + Associates is pleased to announce that a $2,000,000 federal Department of Education Upward Bound grant proposal we recently wrote has been funded in Wisconsin. The grant will be used by a nonprofit organization to provide academic enrichment to encourage low-income African American children to attend college.

[Read more →]