Grant Writing Confidential

RFP needs assessments will sometimes request data that aren’t readily available or just don’t exist. The question then becomes for you, the grant writer, what to do when caught between an RFP’s instructions and the reality of phantom data. When you can’t find it,
The Service Expansion in Mental Health/Substance Services, Oral Health and Comprehensive Pharmacy [...]

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Last night I was reading Madame Bovary and found another example of the cultural phenomenon I described in The Wonderful Past, which is the tendency to compare the present to superior days: “[Canivet] belonged to that great surgical school created Bichat – that generation, now vanished, of philosopher-practitioners, who cherished their art with fanatical love [...]

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In Umberto Eco’s fabulous The Name of the Rose, Adso of Melk says, “In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in [...]

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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 realize that I could collect examples of bad English from the Federal Register all day long and that doing so is as challenging as picking a fight with six-year-olds, but this sentence from the Department of Education’s Charter School Program stands out:
The purpose of the CSP is to increase national understanding of the charter [...]

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Roberta Stevens commented on my recent post, Writing Needs Assessments: How to Make it Seem Like the End of the World, by saying she was “having trouble finding statistics on low self esteem in girls ages 12-19.” This got me thinking about the pointlessness of “self-esteem” as a metric in grant proposals. A simple Google [...]

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In Part I of Studio Executives, Starlets, and Funding, I began by responding to a commenter who said, “I cannot shake the observation that to get a grant you must tell people with the money what they want to hear [...] But there seems to be no objective criteria by which these grants are awarded [...]

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Jake’s post on Zombie Funding got me thinking about my favorite Zombie program, the Urban Parks and Recreation Recovery (UPARR) program. This oddball program emerged in 1978 during the Carter administration and was supposed to link economic development with park development, a curious combination even by federal standards. In 1979, I wrote the first two [...]

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1972—A 21-year-old kid who’d taken a few Saul Alinsky-style courses in community organizing found himself as a Community Organizing Intern working in North Minneapolis, the mostly Black neighborhood in which he grew up, for the Minneapolis Housing and Redevelopment Authority. His supervisor, Helen Starkweather (who may or may not have been related to the better [...]

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Seliger + Associates provides comprehensive grant writing, grant source research and related services for public and nonprofit agencies throughout the United States. Formed in 1993, we have had over 500 clients in 40 states and have written over $175,000,000 in funded grants.
This blog is maintained by Isaac and Jake Seliger. Isaac has been working in [...]

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