Grant Writing Confidential

Ken Stern’s With Charity for All: Why Charities Are Failing and a Better Way to Give is really about a single, fundamental issue and its implications: funders are the real “clients” of most nonprofits, yet their desires dominate everything that nonprofits do. He says that “The care and feeding of donors who make highly personal [...]

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Despite sequestration and budget worries, the Feds are churning out a new grant program every month or so; today, let’s consider this tasty if poorly named treat from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service: “PPHF – 2013 – Cooperative Agreement to Support Navigators in Federally-facilitated and State Partnership Exchanges.” The trade name for this [...]

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“The Web-Deprived Study at McDonald’s” describes a role reversal: in the usual proposal universe, McDonald’s is the enemy—a purveyor of simple sugars and nutritionally bankrupt edible food-like substances that help drive obesity and disease. Internet service providers (ISPs), however, are supposed purveyors of knowledge and connections vital to linking the modern world. But many American [...]

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The Department of Labor just issued the FY ’13 YouthBuild SGA (“Solicitation for Grant Applications,” which is DOL-speak for RFP), and $75,000,000 is available with 75 grants! We’ve written at least 20 funded YouthBuild proposals over the years, including two in the last funding round, so we’re more than a little familiar with this program, [...]

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I recently wrote about the likely impact of the tragic Sandy Hook shooting on grant making and seeking, which is why this CNN piece about ongoing gun violence in inner-city Philadelphia and Chicago in the context of Sandy Hook resonated with me. Unlike the sudden impact of Sandy Hook, which captured the nation’s attention and [...]

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I wrote about the potential impacts of the then-looming fiscal cliff a few weeks ago. At the last minute—actually, about a day after the last minute—Congress and President Obama awoke from their torpor and passed legislation, which what’s left of our media immediately hailed as “preventing the nation from going off the fiscal cliff.” Well, [...]

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EDIT: It looks like we’re not going over the supposed cliff. But much of the analysis below will remain relevant in the coming years, as political fights about debt, spending, and taxation continue. EDIT 2: The analysis below has been augmented with “Sequestration Still Looms Over the Grant World: Two Months and Counting.” I find [...]

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The recent tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT will likely lead to new grant opportunities in school safety, safer facilities, and safety training, as well as mental health and at-risk youth services. It is a sad reality that shocking events often result in new grant programs and increased funding for existing programs, [...]

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Teams don’t write proposals. If you hear about a team that is writing a proposal, that translates roughly to “lots meetings are being held, but no one is actually working on the proposal.” We sometimes hear people at nonprofit and public agencies talk about how they’ve assembled a “team” to write a proposal. For some [...]

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In the L.A. Times, Howard Blume says that a “Gates Foundation-funded education-reform group [is going] to close,” because the organization—Communities for Teaching Excellence lost 75% of its funding. And that 75% came from a single source: the Gates Foundation. This story holds an important lesson for nonprofits: you’re only as good as your next revenue [...]

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