Grant Writing Confidential

In past posts, I’ve written about the foolishness of trying to use self-esteem as a metric (Self-Esteem—What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing), as well as the impossible question, “Who gets funded?” (Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU!— Lessons from Basketball for Grant Writers). An April 29, 2008 Wall Street Journal article, If at First You Don’t [...]

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* We’ve talked before about how difficult reading RFPs can be. The Section 514, 515, and 516 Multi-Family Housing Revitalization Demonstration Program (MPR) gives a particularly good example of how an application can hide who might actually be eligible for the grant. The program is supposed to support rural multi-family housing (which seems like an [...]

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On a software blog, I found this post concerning an author who’d given himself an award:
‘You know, there were two strange things about that award, …Firstly, after I awarded it to myself, I felt oddly elated, as if some august academic body had suddenly realised my true worth as an author and had strained every [...]

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This month’s Giving Carnival—discussed here previously—asks why people give and what motivates giving. I have no idea and suspect no one else does, either, but that’s not reason not to speculate. I assume that some combination of altruism, kindness, self-interest, pride, and noblesse oblige motives giving. Slate talks about the “immeasurable value of philanthropy” here:
But [...]

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Reporters have been writing about the death of small family farm since at least the Great Depression, and governmental efforts have been underway to save it for almost as long if not longer. Combine that with perennial grant programs—which we’ve written about before (and here too)—and you’ll find many odd patterns. Recently I found the [...]

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The Wall Street Journal ran “As Houses Empty, Cities Seek Ways, To Fill the Void” (link goes to a blog that copied the article—see the original here) by Michael Corkery and Ruth Simon on February 6, 2008. They document the large number of vacant and abandoned houses in many American cities and attempts by public [...]

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I noted earlier in Zombie Funding that programs can dwindle from a huge amount of available money to virtually nothing, but they can also rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. Isaac also commented on this phenomenon in Zombie Funding – Six Tana Leaves for Life, Nine for Motion.
Now I’ve seen a more recent example [...]

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A previous post linked to a Wall Street Journal post on charities; now the paper released a full article (may not be accessible to non-subscribers) on the subject of how donors evaluate the usefulness of a program, arguing that donors are becoming more engaged in measurement. One thing missing: statistics showing this is actually part [...]

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Drug use, like healthcare and a number of other modern political background noises, offer endless fodder for debate and study, especially when mixed with teenagers. Now the New York Times has an article about teenagers, risky behaviors, and why some programs aimed at teens are likely to fail:
For example, a study by researchers at the [...]

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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 boom, [...]

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