Grant Writing Confidential

The August 5, 2010 Wall Street Journal published “Charity Brawl: Nonprofits Aren’t So Generous When a Name’s at Stake.” In this curious article, Clifford M. Marks explains the lengths to which Susan G. Komen for the Cure—a very large, successful nonprofit—will go to protect what it thinks is its brand and the phrase “for the [...]

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* Dean Dad on Partnerships from the perspective of a community college administrator:
You don’t really appreciate how difficult collaboration is until you contrast it to running your own stuff. Every collaboration needs a “go-to person” at each site, sometimes grant-funded, sometimes not. Every collaboration has its own calendar, which is usually an amalgam of the [...]

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* Federal programs never get delayed, unless they do. One of our clients received a letter from the Department of Education announcing that the Upward Bound program, which encourages at-risk youth to complete high school and go on to college, is being delayed until fiscal year 2012. This indicates that, as Isaac wrote in “Where [...]

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* The decline of Middle America and the problem of meritocracy has some observations about small towns similar to what Isaac wrote in “Blue Highways: Reflections of a Grant Writer Retracing His Steps 35 Years Later.”
* Deficit Hawk Turns Dove at Home:
Mr. Conrad’s career shows how hard it is to trim spending, even for those [...]

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* Drop in Foundation Giving May Be Steeper than Anticipated. Those of you who want a piece of the action should read Isaac’s post PSST! Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret? Do you Promise Not to Tell?* Here’s How to Write Foundation Proposals.
* You’ve gotta love the convoluted program titles used by the [...]

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* US charities expecting lean holiday. This makes writing proposals even more important, as Isaac explained way back during 2008 in “Market Tanks, Donors Disappear, Corporate Givers Vanish: Not to Worry, This is a Great Time to Write Proposals.”
* How government policy defeats itself, with California as an example. That’s my title for the article, [...]

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I felt like I was living Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man as I read the following news stories this week:

Thousands mob Detroit center in hopes of free cash. The City of Detroit has a $15 million Stimulus Bill grant to “prevent homelessness” and cluelessly announced that people could come to the Downtown Coho [...]

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* Isaac predicted that YouthBuild will run a new competition rather than use earlier grants; it looks like other parts of the federal government have done the same in response to the Stimulus Bill, with the Teacher Quality Partnership Grants Program Recovery Act (ARRA) coming for another round of action.
* Speaking of schools, Steven Brill’s [...]

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* More news on Grants.gov and the Government Accountability Office: Grants.gov Has Systemic Weaknesses That Require Attention. Glad someone in Washington is finally paying attention; Stanley J. Czerwinski is the contact person, so I sent him an e-mail pointing out our earlier posts on the subject, but he hasn’t responded.
Part of the report’s introductory sentence [...]

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* The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report stating that “Consistent Policies [Are] Needed to Ensure Equal Consideration of Grant Applications.” No? Really? It goes on:
[A]pplicants lack a centralized source of information on how and when to use [Grants.gov] alternatives, rendering them less effective than they otherwise might be in reducing the strain on [...]

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