Grant Writing Confidential

* 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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* We wrote about how to get your piece of the stimulus pie, noting that better-prepared organizations are more likely to be funded. Now the Washington Post reports that “Much in Obama stimulus bill won’t hit economy soon:”
It will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed by President-elect Barack Obama will boost the economy, [...]

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We’ve added a link to “Acronyms” in Grant Writing Confidential’s header. The new page defines and explains many of the fun acronyms used by grant writers, so if you ever read in an RFP or elsewhere that “a CBO has been dispatched for BBQ to IHEs and the DOL ASAP,” you’ll know that “a community-based [...]

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* We argued that There is no Free Grant Writing Lunch and You Won’t Find Writers for Nothing, and the New York Times in part explains why in When to Work for Nothing (answer: almost never). In addition, the article says you should seldom work for getting “paid in exposure.”
* Many of you probably read the [...]

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* The New Republic has an article based on a Brookings Institute piece that deconstructs the small-town USA mythology regularly propagated in proposals:
But the idea that we are a nation of small towns is fundamentally incorrect. The real America isn’t found in cities or suburbs or small towns, but in the metropolitan areas or “metros” [...]

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