Grant Writing Confidential

We’re skeptics on the subject of grant writing training as such, but this summer I taught a “Technical Writing” course for juniors and seniors at the University of Arizona. The original course design wasn’t very challenging, so I decided to make it more nutritious by building a unit around grant writing; in a fit of [...]

[Read more →]

HUD just issued the FY ’12 Indian Community Development Block Grant (ICDBG) NOFA (Notice of Funding Availability, which is HUD-speak for RFP). There’s about $61 million available for federally recognized Tribes, Alaskan Native Villages and selected Native American organizations. This is a great opportunity for eligible Native American applicants to fund housing, economic development and [...]

[Read more →]

Most people who claim to be grant writers or “involved” in grants don’t actually write proposals. They’re more often engaged in things like grant management, the distribution of grant funds, or development (fund raising), which are important but very different things than grant writing. Grant writing means you sit down and write a proposal. Grant [...]

[Read more →]

During this seemingly endless period of economic stagnation, “repurpose” has emerged as the word of the decade. Repurpose is omnipresent. My wife recently “repurposed” a duvet that our dog had chewed by patching the hole and stuffing it into a new cover she made from some leftover fabric from a long-forgotten sewing project. Angus Loten’s [...]

[Read more →]

We try hard to keep our proposals fresh by making our project concepts reflect what is going on in communities today—not what the world was like when we entered the business in 1993. For example, several years ago we began including references to emerging social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) in many proposals, mostly [...]

[Read more →]

If you read this week’s grant newsletter, you probably saw the NOFA for the Administration for Children and Families’s “Non-Profit Capacity Building Program,” which I first thought meant “pass-through funds,” since the purpose is “to increase the capacity of a small number of intermediary grantees to provide specific assistance to improve the sustainability of and [...]

[Read more →]

In the 280 or so years I’ve spent grant writing (grant writing years should be considered as dog years because of endless deadlines and dumb RFPs), I don’t believe I’ve ever come across a nonprofit that voluntarily gave back significant federal grants. Faithful readers will know that I use the term “unicorn” for anything I [...]

[Read more →]

Who is in charge of completing and submitting your proposal? You should immediately be able to say, “Jane Doe. Or “John Doe.” Whoever. Can you instantly think of that person’s name—the person who gets the praise if the proposal is submitted on time and technically correct or the blame if it isn’t? If you can’t, [...]

[Read more →]

A friend of mine just applied to medical residencies, and in the process he worked himself into a lather over what specialty he wanted to choose and how he should order his preferred programs. He made a nearly fatal mistake of the kind many grant applicants do: he waited until the last minute to make [...]

[Read more →]

Most social and human services get delivered in one of two ways: on a drop-in basis or a case-managed basis. The latter is often characterized as “wraparound supportive services,” and is the subject of this post. If you’ve ever been to a Boys and Girls Club or YMCA, you’ve received services on a “drop-in” basis, [...]

[Read more →]