Grant Writing Confidential

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Before starting to write a proposal, it is good idea to understand the project concept and stick with this concept throughout the various drafts. If you don’t, the probability of creating an incomprehensible mess is high. In other words, it is a spectacularly bad idea to make big changes during the final stages of finishing [...]

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Today’s post comes from an email sent by someone with broad experience in the grant world who prefers to remain anonymous. His speculation about one RFP demonstrates how the drafting process used to construct RFPs can contribute to an unpalatable final product. Grant writers, like lawyers, must be able to understand writing that simultaneously tries [...]

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