Grant Writing Confidential

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 [...]

[Read more →]

* 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 [...]

[Read more →]

* 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” [...]

[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 →]

* The Wall Street Journal ran “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? Finland’s teens score extraordinarily high on an international test. American educators are trying to figure out why” (the article is accessible for subscribers only). Part of the answer may include a culture that values reading, but the article also says:
Finnish high-school senior Elina [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

* 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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]