Grant Writing Confidential

I thought that I wouldn’t have to write any more posts on the Stimulus Bill, but like Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III, “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.” The curious way the Commonwealth of Virginia has decided to solicit ideas for how to spend its piece of [...]

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Jake received an email response to “FEMA and Grants.gov Together at Last” from a firefighter who is working on a Assistance to Firefighters (AFG) proposal who seems to have been given a bum steer by AFG Program Officer and Jake’s nemesis, Tom Harrington (for background, see “FEMA Tardiness, Grants.gov, and Dealing with Recalcitrant Bureaucrats” and [...]

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Last week I complained that FEMA still hadn’t posted the Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) Program 2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Grants to Grants.gov, which particularly rankled after last year’s fiasco.
My post went up on February 1, and lo! on February 2, the FY2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Grants program appeared on Grants.gov. And it [...]

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A client recently said that she was moved by a description Isaac wrote of her target area in the needs assessment of her proposal, but she asked if we could make it more hopeful. Isaac strongly discouraged her—not as a way of disparaging her neighborhood, but because describing an area as terribly depressed makes the [...]

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This is YouthBuild season at Seliger + Associates, so I spent most of the weekend slaving over a hot YouthBuild proposal. YouthBuild has a curious take on the somewhat mysterious concept of “matching funds.” Newly minted grant writers will soon learn that there are two basic types of matching funds: in-kind and cash. The former [...]

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Christmas comes but once a year, but there is no end to misguided federal efforts to solve the crisis of the day. Leaving aside the collapsing financial sector, doomed US car industry, etc., the crisis de jure is the housing meltdown.* Lost in the current hysteria is the $4 billion Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) passed [...]

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As faithful readers know, in my other life I’m a graduate student in English Literature at the University of Arizona. A few weeks ago, first years were required to attend a brief seminar on grant writing, which amused me given GWC’s low opinion of training sessions, courses, and the like. Isaac is fond of telling [...]

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Faithful readers will recall my post on the perils of last minute changes to proposal concepts in Stay the Course: Don’t Change Horses (or Concepts) in the Middle of the Stream (or Proposal Writing). But, as Paul Harvey likes to say, now it is time for The Rest of the Story. . .
Just after I’d [...]

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It seems that the Bard is always topical, and All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare’s “problem comedies” that may actually be a tragedy, comes to mind as an apropos title for a comedic tale that illustrates one of the many odd aspects of grant writing: why there is little reason to read comments [...]

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This is the second of two posts; the first appears here.
In addition to being unsupported by the research demanded by the program, as described in this post, the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program (CBAE) RFP is also poorly organized. It separates concepts and ideas that belong together for no apparent reason. This is most evident in [...]

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