I am being told that I must become a “grant writer” for my law enforcement agency within a month or so. There is not enough time to apprentice so they want me to learn everything I need to know in a 2 day workshop!!! Any suggestions?

Suggestions! I’m filled with ‘em. Especially for someone who has transformed, like one of the X-Men, into a grant-writing superhero. Again like the X-Men, I replied via e-mail:

The self-serving but accurate answer to your quandary is “hire us.” Note that we also edit proposals, although about 60 – 70% of the time, when people hire us to edit they’d have been better off just hiring us for the full monty. If that’s not going to happen, I’d say this:

1) Read all of Grant Writing Confidential; I should turn it into an ebook, but I haven’t had time, and making this blog into a cohesive book will probably never be worth it from a pure cost/benefit analysis. Still, I want to anyway—especially after reading “Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors.” What I wrote in “Why You’re Unlikely to see ‘Seliger and Associates Presents Grant Writing Confidential: The Book and Musical’ Anytime Soon” is still accurate, but the possibilities opened up by self-publishing have exploded in the last year.

2) Does your agency have a particular program to which it wants to apply? If so, which one? Assuming the agency does have a specific program in mind, write as much as you can of the proposal draft before you go to the workshop. Take the draft with you and try to discuss it with whoever is teaching it. Then you’ll basically be turning that person into an editor / professor; it’s much easier to discuss writing, or almost any other “making thing” discipline, in the concrete than in the abstract.

Taking an infinite number of workshops is not going to make the blank page any easier. Having something, anything, on the blank page is better than having nothing. Isaac likes to say, “Something can be edited. Write something.”

3) If you have anyone you know who’s a decent writer and can be pressed into service as an editor, warn and beg them in advance that you need their help. Every writer needs an editor.

4) Start writing as soon as you can; leave blanks; get to the end. I’m repeating what I said in number four, but something cannot be edited if it hasn’t been written. I suspect this fundamental fact scuppers as many would-be grant writers as any other.

5) Good luck.

6) GWC readers: you have any other advice for Susan?

* Fighting Inner-City Crime: When, and how, citizens should take action is a pressing question. Notice the author, Sudhir Venkatesh, who also wrote Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, which is useful for anyone developing proposal project concepts and needs assessments.

* “As [the] Public Sector Sheds Jobs, [Women] and Minorities Hurt Most.”

* A review of the new Seagate Momentus XT. I have the old version in my laptop and will say that it was a tremendous improvement over a regular, 5400 RPM laptop hard drive.

* The Research Bust:

[A]fter four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?

* The brutal logic of climate change, an important and likely-to-be-ignored post.

* “The End of Stagnation and the Coming Innovation Boom;” especially note this:

Our ancestors were bold and industrious, they built a significant part of our transportation and energy infrastructure more than half a century ago. It would be impossible to build that same infrastructure today. Could we build the Hoover Dam? We have the technology, of course, but do we have the will? In building infrastructure many interest groups can say no and nearly no one can say yes. We are beset by a swarm of veto players. Time, however, is running out. We cannot rely on the infrastructure of our past to travel to our future.

I’ve seen the veto players and automatic “no” people in watching Seattle attempt to build a light-rail system to alleviate its atrocious traffic problems. The number of lawsuits and amount of issues are staggering, so it’s taken the city and other players literally decades to get anything done. The proposed California Bullet Train is another example of the same.

* Still: Tunnels: Seattle’s boring past filled with thrills:

In a world where most work is done with a keyboard and dispersed into electronic ether, their work is refreshingly real, lasting, utilitarian. Workers seem also to share a frontier can-do spirit. Masters of a subterranean universe, not for nothing is their line of work called heavy civil: a good name for a grunge band, or a workforce that stops at pretty much nothing.

* Unsurprising: Alabama Can’t Find Anyone to Fill Illegal Immigrants’ Old Jobs.

* [Bill] O’Reilly Gets Ambushed, just like he does to other people. One definition of a bully might be someone who can’t accept what they do to others or say about them.

* James Fallows: With Mitt’s Ascent, We’re Back to the ‘Mormon Question’, a very good post and one that changes what I think.

* Without comprehensive sex education, porn is the only solid information kids are getting about sex. File this under “the obvious.”

* A fascinating and largely accurate list of what kinds of inequality are acceptable and what kinds aren’t, by David Brooks:

Status inequality is acceptable for college teachers. Universities exist within a finely gradated status structure, with certain schools like Brown clearly more elite than other schools. University departments are carefully ranked and compete for superiority.

Status inequality is unacceptable for high school teachers. Teachers at this level strongly resist being ranked. It would be loathsome to have one’s department competing with other departments in nearby schools.

And people involved in each system probably believe in both without questioning why they do or how they came to believe what they believe. I would also be interested in seeing other lists of this kind and for other countries.

Brooks ends: “Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other. Have a nice stay.” We may also believe that equality of opportunity doesn’t imply equality of results, although that itself might be acceptable to believe while it might not be acceptable to believe in many circles that we have equality of opportunity.

* David Henderson’s “Occupy Monterey” talks are fascinating in part because they reveal the basic economic illiteracy of much of his audience. There are three parts, all at the link; some of the comments shouted from people in the audience remind me of things I’ve heard peers and profs say in English departments.

* The No-Brainer Issue of the Year: Let High-Skill Immigrants Stay:

Behind Door #1 are people of extraordinary ability: scientists, artists, educators, business people and athletes. Behind Door #2 stand a random assortment of people. Which door should the United States open?

In 2010, the United States more often chose Door #2 [. . .]

* Get Ready for Manufacturing’s Big Comeback: “As the cost of doing business in China rises, U.S. manufacturing could be on the verge of a renaissance.”

* Famous Authors’ Harshest Rejection Letters. It’s amazing to me not only how little we know, but how little we know how little we know (read that twice).

* We haven’t met the aliens because they’ve become enmeshed in video games. Alternately, the reason we haven’t met any aliens morphs with the contemporary issues we’re starting to notice; during the Cold War, nuclear annihilation was a probable parable. Today, it’s cultural suicide abetted by technology.

* The slow erosion of legal rights; “terrorism” and “drugs” appear to be the keys to removing Constitutional safeguards.

* Ending the Infographic Plague.

* I already linked to this but see no reason no to do so again, since a reader sent it to me: Bookshelf porn. Note that this involves no actual nudity; the books are closed.

* “The secret lives of feral dogs: A Pennsylvania city instructs police to shoot strays, opening a sad window on animal care in the age of austerity.”

* “The average health care insurance premium today is over $15,000 and by 2021 it may be headed to $32,000 or so (admittedly that estimate is based on extrapolation);” that’s from “The median wage figure and the health care costs figure.”

* “The fragile teenage brain: An in-depth look at concussions in high school football.” After reading about the many football concussion studies, I’ve learned that a lot of the brain damage football causes isn’t from single big hits—it’s from many small hits that accrue in practice and elsewhere. There is no way I’d let my kid play football.

A nutritional snack must be served each day the after school program operates. All snacks are required to meet specific nutrition requirements as stated in California Education Code (EC) Section 49431. Include a statement that explains how the nutritional snack requirement will be met.

There really is a standard for everything now, and I don’t even think this one is a joke—unlike the ISO 3103 standard for brewing tea.* Its abstract says:

The method consists in extracting of soluble substances in dried tea leaf, containing in a porcelain or earthenware pot, by means of freshly boiling water, pouring of the liquor into a white porcelain or earthenware bowl, examination of the organoleptic properties of the infused leaf, and of the liquid with or without milk, or both.

Some of us can truly specify everything and understand nothing. And by “some of us,” I mean bureaucrats. But I think the joke ISO writers were at least in on what they were doing, and their effort is close to Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, where he does things like take the King James Bible and render it in bureaucrat-speak:

“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Here it is in modern English:

“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

I would like to see the writers of the 21st CCLC RFP have a go at the KJB in California bureaucratese.

Incidentally, Orwell was also interested in how to make tea, but he did not describe his preferred tea making style this way: “The method consist in extracting of soluble substances in dried tea leaf.” Alas: what a loss to humanity.

* I don’t think I’ve ever seen an (intended) joke in an RFP. If you have, leave a note in the comments.

In the tradition of the posts above, we’re going to indulge that fascination in more depth than in “Tools of the Trade—What a Grant Writer Should Have,” which didn’t get the derisive “this post is worthless without pictures” (“tpiwwp“) comment it might have deserved.

If enough of you send in pictures of your own workstations, we’ll amend this post to include them or put up a second post on the subject, in the fashion of the Webdesigner Depot post linked to above.

Chairs

Isaac and I have new chairs.

Both of us used to use the Aeron. This chair is so famous that, for example, most posters on a Hacker News thread asking about cheap alternatives to the Aeron agree that there is no alternative. One person says that he (or she) worked as an office liquidator and found that Aerons and Steelcase chairs held their value. I’ve quoted Joel Spolsky on the subject before, but let me do so again:

“Let me, for a moment, talk about the famous Aeron chair, made by Herman Miller. They cost about $900. This is about $800 more than a cheap office chair from OfficeDepot or Staples.

They are much more comfortable than cheap chairs. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable. The back and seat are made out of a kind of mesh that lets air flow so you don’t get sweaty. The ergonomics, especially of the newer models with lumbar support, are excellent.

They last longer than cheap chairs. We’ve been in business for years and every Aeron is literally in mint condition. They easily last for ten years. The cheap chairs literally start falling apart after a matter of months. You’ll need at least four $100 chairs to last as long as an Aeron.”

Re your comment: “That damn plastic bar running across the front creates a horrible pressure point and probably increases the likelihood of DVT.”

The plastic bar on mine seems to create a natural pressure release because it curves downward. It seems that such a feel should occur if you’ve got the right height.

(Notice that Alain de Botton also uses an Aeron.)

Now we both use a different Herman Miller chair: the Embody. It’s not exactly a successor to the Aeron, but it is a different sort of chair; it doesn’t have conventional plastic edges. The shape is supposed to shape itself to your body. As far as we can tell, it does so. The biggest challenge is its infinite adjustability. Nonetheless, like the Aeron, I can sit in mine virtually all day without problems. That being said, you probably shouldn’t sit in a chair all day; I do get up to do pushups occasionally.

The big challenge is getting them adjusted—a challenge whose description will have to wait for future posts.

Isaac’s Gear

In 2006, Isaac bought a Mac Pro because you still needed one to operate three monitors. By now, monitors have gotten so large and Mac Pros so expensive that he’s replaced the setup with a 27″ iMac with a SSD and a 24″ Dell side monitor. He reports plenty of screen area for multiple open windows and that both are crystal clear. He also has switched keyboards, from a garden variety wireless keyboard that was the subject of “What Three Years of Grant Writing Looks Like” to a very clicky Tactile Pro 3 keyboard.

Jake’s Gear

Like Isaac, I’m using a 27″ iMac with an SSD. My side monitor is slightly smaller, at 23″, but still offers lots of space for secondary documents. It’s not unusual for me to have as many as five text panes open at a time: an RFP, a web browser, a main document, an “extra space” document, and client background material. With virtually every successive computer I’ve owned, I’ve looked at the massive screen size and thought, “I probably can’t use more than this effectively.”

The Kinesis keyboard I use is ludicrously expensive and takes about ten days to really acclimate. At that point, it’d hard to imagine going back to a standard keyboard. It’s not merely more comfortable; it’s so much more comfortable that I don’t get the hand aches I used to. I began using mine as a review unit. The “review” has lasted two years and will probably last forever.

Those speakers are Bose Companion 20s, which deliver nice sound without having a bass box. They aren’t going to sound as good as speakers with a bass box, but they also reduce desktop clutter some.

Although I don’t have one pictured here, I’m also fond of carrying around notebooks; these days I like the Rhodia Webnotebook, also called the “Webbie,” which doesn’t have the durability problems of Moleskines. In pens, I rather like the Sigma Micron, which offers thin lines that bond to paper and won’t wash out or fade over time.

Desks

The desks took hours and hours to find, but they’re incredibly sturdy, don’t shake, offer great ergonomics when combined with the keyboard trays, have lasted for years, and weren’t ridiculously expensive to buy. The writer Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote “I moved into this room 20 years ago and spent the first five years fighting desks that weren’t right in some way.” Five years with the wrong desk? That’s terrible, and it explains why we invested so much time in finding the right desks.

The nice part about finding the right desk is that they a) fade into the background and b) don’t bother you. In fact, they’re almost a pleasure to sit at and use, as with any well-made tool. They also don’t create “accidental” barriers to working, which I write about in the next section.

In our case, we’re using black Maxon Series 1000s. They can’t be bought retail; you have to go through a dealer, wait four to six weeks, and choose a keyboard tray too (we’re using Humanscale ones). But the result is a desk that doesn’t wiggle. Wiggly children are fine, but wiggly desks will give you eyestrain and make you want to get up and go somewhere else—anywhere else—as soon as possible.

The keyboard combined with the Embody means we sit in nice ergonomic postures, like the lady in the picture, which means that when we’re in a state of Flow while writing we’re not going to stop because of agonizing wrist pain.

Removing Accidental Impediments to Grant Writing

Our experience so far has been that OS X lessens the accidental—in the sense of “incidental, or appurtenant,” as Frederick Brooks says—aspects of writing by being more stable and providing more useful productivity features than other operating systems. Many people have almost religious views on this issue, and their opinions are scattered about the Internet like excrement on a poorly tended lawn, and we don’t want to contribute to that particular mess.

The basic goal of any equipment is probably to make life and/or work easier for the user of those tools. As Brooks also says regarding software engineering, “… motivational factors can increase productivity. On the other hand, environmental and accidental factors, cannot; but these factors can decrease productivity when negative.” So it is with any kind of intellectual tool, and OS X seems to help avoid making environmental and accidental factors detrimental to the production of proposals.

In addition, anyone in charge of grant writers’ offices should read Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister’s book Peopleware. Like anyone who works in a modern office, you should read this. Too few people understand the needs of “knowledge workers,” which is an obnoxious term that nonetheless describes what a lot of people whose job is to turn raw thoughts into information do.

In the future…

The GeekDesk is a height-adjustable desk that allows you to work standing or sitting. Various researchers have argued that sitting for long periods is bad for you; see a summary of that position in “Your Office Chair Is Killing You: Meet public enemy No. 1 in today’s workplace.” (Philip Roth, by the way, writes standing up.)

We also have a question for you, our readers: what, if anything, are we missing?

Offices and Improving Productivity

This post might appear frivolous, but I suspect it isn’t as much as it might appear at first glance. As Paul Graham says in “What Business Can Learn from Open Source,” “This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done.” That means there’s a lot of possible improvement in the average office. If reading this helps people realize those productivity gains, I’ll call a victory for grant writers and others who spend long hours staring at a computer monitor.

In the end, of course, none of this matters unless you’ve got proposals to write and are willing to sit down and write them. If you do, however, the value of good equipment becomes steadily more obvious to you, even if it isn’t necessarily obvious to the managers who are above you.

* I’m still astonished at the number of writers who use laptops, especially without external keyboards and mice. What of carpal tunnel syndrome and ergonomics? What of tiny screens that force you to flick among the main document, research, RFPs, background information, and data? Unless you’ve installed a Solid-State Drive (SSD), what of slow, low-RPM hard drives that make opening programs a drag? Perhaps these writers don’t spent eight or more hours straight writing at a time, as we sometimes do. To be sure, some people hook up external keyboards, mice, and monitors to their laptops, as I did in college and immediately after, but once one does all that the question becomes… why not just go desktop?

In addition, notice the disproportionate number of Macs in use both by writers and web designers. Yeah, yeah, Mac users are jerks, or, in John Scalzi’s formulation, Apple Fans Are Status-Seeking Beta Monkeys, but we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and think there’s more than a little to OS X.

But what does that mean? The RFP is even more opaque than our description:

In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, nonprofit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, tribe, city, or region around arts and cultural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.

Does “shap[ing] the physical and social character” mean building stuff? Drawing stuff on walls? Tearing stuff down? Giving money to artists? The RFP specifies that it has $25,000 to $150,000 available, which probably isn’t enough to open a generic Starbucks, let alone engage in “creative placemaking,” which is a bureaucrat phrase if I’ve ever seen one. Substantial projects involving new structures or major rehabilitations of old structures could easily blow through $100,000 in engineering and design work.

Fortunately, the RFP forbids direct construction activities but doesn’t say that up front. On the other hand, “Predevelopment, design fees, community planning, and installation of public art are eligible.” Which is another way of saying, “This program is designed to fund meetings,” and “creative placemaking” means working as hard as you can to mention the word “arts” as many times as possible in your proposal and tying whatever existing projects are on your community’s dockets into this program.

This is the kind of grant that’s ideal for a city or town or redevelopment agency that’s already been reading up on Richard Florida and has some project in the works. It’s also good for organizations that want to have meetings and keep at least one or two of their planners busy. But it doesn’t have enough money associated to make a real difference to organizations trying to rehabilitate a neighborhood; it’s a cherry that goes with an existing project.

Where’d this come from?

I mentioned Richard Florida in the last paragraph because he wrote, among other things, an obnoxious but possible accurate book called The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, which argues that the world’s latte-sippers and Mac-laptop-tinkerers and beret-wearing artists and so forth are congregating in certain places and are key to transformational changes in today’s economy. He might even be right. Florida, along with Edward Glaeser (Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier) and a bunch of urban sociologists, has been studying what makes some cities and metropolitan areas in the U.S. so vibrant and successful (think New York, Seattle, and Austin, Texas) while others wither (think Detroit, most obviously, and, until recently, Pittsburgh). His answer: smart, artsy people in non-manufacturing industries. The kinds of people who need so-called “third places” like Starbucks where they can go hang out and sketch in their Rhodia Webbies (I am sometimes one of these people, by the way, which is why I can speak of them as I do).* And if they have a sweet mural or whatever nearby to look at, they’re more likely to come up with the next iteration of Facebook and tell their friends to move nearby.

That’s the theory, anyway, and in Our Town we’re seeing the ideas of Florida, Glaeser, Howard Shultz, and others filter from the land of academia and magazines into “Here’s some money, but not enough to do much that is significant.” For nonprofit and public agencies who apply, this is, in essence, a sort of inspirational grant; good for getting things going, not quite big enough to have a real impact, but better—way better—than nothing.

Something almost always is.

* My favorite coffee shop in Tucson is Caffe Luce, which is also conveniently situated next to the university.

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! [. . .]

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

I wrote a post on “College graduate earning and learning: more on student choice” that also covers these issues.

* You Say Latino: “I was talking with some graduate students, people I didn’t know, when the subject turned to minority issues. Every time I said Hispanic, the guy sitting next to me said Latino. This was about a decade ago; I hadn’t realized the terminology had changed.”

* [R]ising gas prices have pretty much wiped out the whole cash value of the stimulus to families. Read the whole thing at the link, along with this paper by James Hamilton. It may turn out that we simply can’t do anything about macro economic performance without working on energy problems. This kind of information has been circling among economics bloggers for quite a while but hasn’t made much way into the mainstream.

* “A toddler hit by two vehicles in a southern Chinese city and left unassisted by more than a dozen passersby died Friday, adding new fire to an anguished debate over the state of empathy in China’s fast-changing society.” Notice to the video. File this under “The world is not flat” (yet) and “culture is the water we swim in,” usually without knowing it.

* What dealing with California bureaucrats is like. We’ve experienced this indirectly; see, for example, this post and this one for more.

* Solving America’s teen sex “problem:” The Dutch have dramatically reduced adolescent pregnancies, abortions and STDs. What do they know that we don’t?

* “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute” is about a school without computers and the high-tech moguls who send their kids to the school. This resonates with me, given the research on computers in schools and the dangers of distraction.

* Hispanics Reviving Faded Towns on the Plains; notice the contrast with what Isaac wrote in “Seliger + Associates Hitches Up the Wagons and Heads Out to Where the Pavement Turns to Sand.”

* “The Economics of Bike Lanes;” hint: they’re pretty good. Notice this quote about the Washington MetroRail: “Parking spaces cost on average $25,000 each, compared with $1,000 per space for a secured bike cage. “It’s an extremely expensive proposition for us” to expand car parking, [Kristin Haldeman, Metro’s manager of access planning] said.”

* On Never Quitting starts with a great line: “I used to think Joe Konrath was full of shit.” Note that this is posted on Joe Konrath’s blog.

* Grant humor, via The New Yorker:

* Why academics should blog, which seems completely obvious to me.

* How to fix math education in high school and college. Good luck: the incentives don’t look good to me right now.

* A former teacher gets an MFA in puppetry and can’t find a job afterward; note that we’ve worked for a number of nonprofit puppeteers over the years. Hat tip Alex Tabarrok, and do read his analysis:

What astounds me is not that someone could amass $35,000 in student loans pursuing a dream of puppetry, everyone has their dreams and I do not fault Joe for his. What astounds me is that Richard Kim, the executive editor of The Nation and the author of this article, thinks that the failure of a puppeteer to find a job he loves is a good way to illustrate the “national nightmare” of the job market.

* The feds pay contract IT workers half what they pay their own employees. If that’s not enough, those contractors then turn around and work to minimize their own employees’ rights and compensation.

* Best recent RFP: the National Park Service’s “Exploration of Acoustic Environments – Natural Sound Field Activities Focused on Diverse and Undeserved Youth.” I like noise too.

* From the U.K.: World power swings back to America. Maybe.

* New York City Cops and contempt for the law.

* Malcolm Gladwell on “The real genius of Steve Jobs.”

* Apple may axe the Mac Pro. We hope not: Isaac used one for four years, and the form factor is amazing for anyone who needs expandability in their computers. That being said, their current prices have gone from ludicrous to ridiculous; we hope for a price cut and more reasonable processors, rather than the removal of the line itself.

It’s easy to wonder how eating-what-you-kill as a metaphor might apply to the rest of Zuckerberg’s life, but since I’m not friends with him I can’t ask. Nonetheless, you can probably can imagine how this metaphor applies to grants: in times when you’re prospecting for grants, you should be a bear and bite any salmon, as Isaac wrote at the link. You can’t afford to be as picky as you might otherwise be.

In an idealized world, you’d probably get your preferred mix of grants, donations, and contracts, with a heavy emphasis on donations unencumbered by donor restrictions. I’d also like someone to randomly give me a million bucks, but that doesn’t seem real likely, and if someone did give me a million bucks, I’d worry that I was walking into a movie—specifically, a thriller with lots of murky motives that might leave the protagonist dead at the end. So I write proposals and teach undergraduates instead of waiting for magical money that, even if it did appear, would probably result in a scenario like the one described in Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan (hint: the title is ironic. Also, the book is quite good and highly recommended).

So if, like me, your organization doesn’t to exist in an idealized world, the desired blend of funding streams is not going to magically appear. Which means you should take what you can get. Until the recent financial crisis, for example, a lot of organizations could rely on capitated funds and contracts through cities, counties, and sometimes states, which provided steady, reliable sources of incomes to supplement donations and the occasional grant. Now a lot of organizations that once relied on such sources simply don’t have them. They can’t go to Safeway and pick up a nicely cut chicken.

They have to eat what they kill, like Zuckerberg, although Mark is doing so by choice and can send someone out to Whole Foods for a chicken or 12 anytime he feels like adopting a new philosophical stance. You can’t, and as a result the number and quality of grants that organizations apply for takes on greater urgency. One reason we like discussing Upward Bound so much is simple: it offers the possibility of five years of uninterrupted funding. That can carry an agency that might otherwise become skeletal through the lean times that continue.

Most organizations simply don’t have good alternatives to grants any more. They shouldn’t be worried about finding some existential balance between donations and grants; they should be taking whatever they can get. There aren’t a lot of choices; some organizations are trying to survive one Bratwurst at a time, as we described a few years ago, but fundraisers like washing cars and selling food are really tough, especially since you’ll naturally be up against professionals whose job is selling bun-wrapped meat or cleaning vehicles.

We’re not fools: we know that most nonprofits would rather have donors rain money on their head. I’d like to win the Lotto or an inheritance and be an artist full-time, but that’s not incredibly likely for me in the short term. For nonprofits, easy money from the Stimulus Bill is gone. You’re back to the basic stuff. You can debate this all day, but the proposals have to be written. You have to eat what you kill. If you’re not ready to wield the knife, you should hire somebody who will.

* I finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, and among many other fascinating tidbits Isaacson describes Jobs’s numerous nutritional oddities surrounding food and Jobs’s belief in the possibility food offers for transcendence. Jobs went through periodic dietary restrictions, like eating and drinking only fruit or fruit juices, being a vegan, and fasting. I wonder about the extent to which this impacted his illness and how, if at all, his unusual eating beliefs were tied to the extreme achievement in other aspects of his life.

For the last several weeks, we’ve known the draft FY ’12 Upward Bound NOFA was floating in the ether, although the Department of Education didn’t seem to want to post it publicly for some unknown reason. But, after 19 years in business, we’ve got our sources and finagled a copy of the draft RFP and related docs in advance of publication.

By the time your read this, you should be able to find an announcement about Upward Bound in the October 31 Federal Register. The draft essentially provides a 30 day comment period on the Department of Education’s plan for “reinstatement of a previously approved application for grants under the Upward Bound (UB) Project (1840-0550), which has expired.” This bit of federal Doublespeak means that there have been some legislative changes since the last Upward Bound RFP process in 2007. The Department of Education needs to go through a public comment period before issuing the RFP they’ve already produced—and it will probably be in more or less the same form as the version we have.

You’ve gotta love the timing of the Department of Education performing a little prestidigitation by releasing the phantom RFP on Halloween. Boo!

I’ve paged through the 114 single-spaced page Upward Bound RFP and it looks remarkably like every other TRIO Program RFP I’ve ever seen. But the best part in the RFP is that there will be $305,289,000 for new UB awards, with an average award of $330,000/year for five years. The Department of Education is still being coy about the deadline, but let’s do some math: the 30 day comment period starts on October 31, it’ll take about 15 days or so for the program officers to examine and reject comments, and about 15 days or so to set up the next FR publication. Thus, the FY ’12 RFP should be published between Christmas and January 15. These days, most Department of Education RFPs have 30 day deadlines, so expect the deadline to be late January to mid-February.

Upward Bound will be one of the best opportunities this year to grab a pretty big Department of Education grant salmon this year. Nonprofits and institutions of higher education (IHE, which means “college or university” in Edu-speak) are eligible applicants. Upward Bound is a great way of funding academic support programs for high school students to enable them to build the skills needed to graduate from high school and thrive in the postsecondary education milieu (free proposal phrase here).

Just don’t wait for the actual RFP to be issued. Find the draft RFP, read it, and, if you think you organization could run the program, go to work on planning the project. With over $300 million up for grabs, there should be at least 1,000 grants awarded. We’ve written many funded TRIO grants, including Upward Bound, and know that the funding decisions for these programs are often the stuff of strange tales. But if your organization doesn’t get moving and submit a great, technically correct proposal, you will miss out on a twice-a-decade opportunity. It’ll take that long for the next Upward Bound bus to roll by. Get on this one.

Teaching a writing class shows the instructor how things that’ve become easy for him might be very hard for everyone else. Working with students and grading their assignments also made me realize how much tacit knowledge I’ve accumulated about grant writing—mostly through listening to Isaac tell war stories and berate me over missing sections when I was much younger. That was definitely a “trial-by-fire” experience. In a classroom, students should get a gentler but still rigorous introduction to grant writing, and that’s what I tried to do, even though teaching effectively is hard, just like grant writing; the skills necessary for one don’t necessarily overlap very much or very often. As a result, it’s worth describing some of what I learned, since teachers often learn as much if not more than students.

Breaking down the component parts of the process requires thought. As I said above, relatively little of my knowledge about grant writing was explicit and ready to be communicated. This is probably true of all fields, but I haven’t noticed how hard it is to articulate what to do and how to do it. In response to student questions, I often had to slow down and ask myself how I knew what I knew before I could answer their questions.

For example, because I knew a lot about TRIO programs, I knew that EOC aims to provide a very large number of people with a very small amount of help, direction, and information. Think of the amount of money per student and the amount of time invested in that student as correlated: less money means less time. Which approach is “better?” Probably neither. But I needed to find a way to make sure students could figure out what the RFP is really saying without too much prompting.

You can’t teach technical writing outside of the context of regular writing. Most students didn’t have well-developed general writing skills, so we had to collectively work on those at the same time they were trying to learn about grant writing as a specific domain. You can’t write an effective proposal without knowing basic English grammar and being able to write sentences using standard syntax. Most high schools simply don’t teach those writing skills, or, if they do, students don’t retain them. I’ve learned over time to incorporate basic rules in my freshman-level classes, and I definitely had to do the same in this class—especially because most students weren’t humanities majors and hadn’t been required to write since they were freshmen.

I’m not talking about abstruse topics like the gerunds versus present participles or a finely grained definition of the pluperfect tense. I’m talking about simple stuff like comma usage and avoiding passive voice (this is actually a good test for you: do you know a couple major comma rules? Hint: “When you take a breath / pause” isn’t one. If you’ve begun sweating at this self-test, try Write Right!).

Your proposal isn’t going to be rejected outright because you misuse one or two commas. Typos happen. But if grammar and syntax errors make it difficult to read, there’s a good chance that reviewers simply won’t try to read it. The same applies to your layout, which is why Isaac wrote “What Does a Grant Proposal Look Like Exactly? 13 Easy Steps to Formatting a Winning Proposal.” In addition, a proposal filled with typos and other errors signals to reviewers that you don’t even care enough to find or hire someone to edit your work. And if you don’t care before you get the money, what’s it going to be like after you get the money?

On the subject of what students know, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses demonstrates that an astonishingly large number of college graduates effectively learn nothing, academically speaking, over their four to six years of college life. It should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in postsecondary education.

You can’t be an effective grant writer without basic writing skills. People who can’t write complete sentences or coherent paragraphs simply need to develop those skills prior to trying to write complex documents. If you, the reader, are starting to write proposals and your own writing skills are shaky, consider finding a basic composition class at a local community college and taking that.

Reading RFPs is hard. Which is why I wrote “Deconstructing the Question: How to Parse a Confused RFP” and “Adventures in Bureaucracy and the Long Tale of Deciphering Eligibility: A Farce.” The EOC RFP is more than 100 pages, so I gave students the dozen or so pages necessary to write the “Plan of Operations.” Relatively few understood the inherent trade-off among the number of participants served, the cost per participant, and the maximum grant amount. Fine-grained details like this are part of what makes grant writing a challenge and, sometimes, a pleasure when the puzzle pieces slip into place.

There’s nothing to stop RFP writers from improving the organizational structure of their RFPs, but they simply don’t and have no incentive to. So I don’t think the inherent challenge of reading RFPs will go away over time.

A lot of students haven’t learned to write in the plain style: they use malapropisms, or pretentious diction that doesn’t feel right because they don’t trust themselves to use simple words correctly and in an appropriate order to convey meaning.

The best proposals balance imaginativeness and fidelity to the RFP. There is not a limitless number of possible activities to entice people into universities; if you’re proposing that leprechaun jockeys ride unicorns through the streets, shouting about the program through bullhorns, you’re probably erring on the side of being too, er, imaginative. If the only way you can conceive of getting students to college is by creating a website, you probably need more imagination.

Grant Writing Confidential is, in fact, useful. This isn’t just an effort to toot our own horn, but I gave students reading assignments in the form of blog posts, with about three posts required per day. The students who read the posts thoroughly and took the advice within wrote significantly better proposals than those who didn’t. When would-be grant writers ask us for advice these days, we tell give them much of the advice we’ve been giving for close to 19 years—along with a point to read all of GWC. It shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to read the archives, and someone who comes out on the other end should be better equipped to write proposals.

At some point, I’ll organize a bunch of the posts into a coherent framework for would-be grant writers and for others who simply want to sharpen their skills.

Nonprofit organization itself isn’t easy to understand. Nonprofits, despite the name and the associations with the word “corporation,” are still “corporations”—which means they have the organizational structure and challenges of any group of humans who band together to accomplish some task. People who work in nonprofit and public agencies already know this, but a lot of college students don’t realize that nonprofits require management, have hierarchies of some kind (the executive director probably isn’t doing the same thing as a “peer outreach worker,” at least most of the time, however important both roles may be), and that specialization occurs within the nonprofit itself.

People understand things better in story form. We sometimes tell “war stories” on this blog because they’re usually more evocative than dry, abstract, and technical posts. People hunger for narrative, and you need to tell a story in your proposal.

People who’re being taught usually want stories too, and when possible I tried to illustrate points about grant writing through story. But I didn’t realize the importance of this when I started. I should’ve, especially since I’m a PhD student in English Lit and spend a lot of my time studying and analyzing story.

Students prefer honest work over dishonest make-work, like most people. Too much of school consists of assignments that either aren’t hard or aren’t hard in the right way. We often call those assignments “busy-work” or “make-work.” Most group projects fall into this category. Students resent them to some extent, and I can’t blame them.

The cliche has it that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. The same is true in proposals: if an application is funded, everyone wants to maximize their perceived role in executing it. If it isn’t, then Pat down the hall wrote most of it anyway, and we should blame Pat. Having a small group talk over the proposal but a single person writing it will result in both a better, more coherent proposal and in more satisfied writers, who are doing real work instead of watching someone else type—which usually means “checking Facebook” or chatting, or whatever.

In our own workflow, as soon as we’re hired we set a time to scope the proposal with the client shortly after we received a signed agreement and the first half of our fee. We usually talk with the client for half an hour to an hour and a half, and once we’ve done that we usually write a first draft of the narrative section of the proposal and draft a “documents memo” that describes all the pieces of paper (or, these days, digital files) that make up a complete proposal. This is real work. We don’t waste any time sitting in meetings, eating doughnuts, articulating a vision statement, or any of the other things nominal “grant writers” say they do.

Time pressure is a great motivator. The class I taught lasted just three weeks, and students had three to four days of class time to write their proposals. At the end of the class, many remarked that they didn’t think they could write 15 to 20 pages in a week. They could, and so can you. The trick, however, is choosing your week: you don’t want to write 20 pages two days before the deadline. You want to write them two weeks or two months before the deadline.

If you can’t, hire us, and we will. Assuming we have enough time, of course; we also take a fair number of last minute assignments, which often happens when other grant writing consultants quit or when a staff person realizes that this grant writing thing is harder than it looks. We’re happy to take those last-minute assignments if we have the capacity for them, but it’s not a bad idea to hire us in advance if you know you want to apply for a program.

Starting early gives you time to revise, edit, and polish. This advice is obvious and applies to many fields, but a lot of people don’t think they can do as much as they can until they’re forced to act because of circumstances. But little stops you from applying the same force to yourself earlier.

Conversely, Facebook is a great scourge to concentration. I taught in a computerized classroom that had an Orwellian feature: from the master computer, I could see the screens of anyone else in the classroom. Students who spent more time dawdling on Facebook produced worse proposals than those who didn’t. This might be a correlation-is-not-causation issue—worse writers might spend more time on Facebook, instead of Facebook causing worse writing—but I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook and other Internet distractions are hurting people’s ability to focus for long periods of time. I think consciously about how to disconnect distraction, and, if it’s an issue for me, I can virtually guarantee it’s an issue for many others too.

People who have never written a proposal before aren’t really ready to write a full proposal. This might seem obvious too, but it’s worth reiterating that few people who’ve never tried to write a complex proposal can do it right the first time. Grant writing, like many activities, benefits from a master/apprentice or editor/writer relationship.

This, in fact, is how I learned to write proposals: Isaac taught me. Granted, he’s a tough master, but the result of difficult training is mastery when done. Viewers like watching Gordon Ramsay on TV because he’s tough and that toughness may accelerate the learning process for those on the other end of his skewer. I can’t do the same in class, which is probably a good thing. Nonetheless, whether you’re making an egg souffle or a Department of Education proposal, don’t expect perfection the first time through. Actually, don’t expect perfection at all, but over time your skills will improve.

Faithful readers may recall “Why Winning an Olympic Gold Medal is Not Like Getting a Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP) Grant;” in 2010, I wrote about having to tell a client that a high point total does not always ensure getting particular grant, including a Department of Education PEP grant. What I didn’t put in that post was an important fact: our client insisted on including program elements that were certain to reduce the point total. Although I advised her of this, she insisted on including them anyway, and the grant was not funded.

A few months ago, we were hired to edit a new client’s previously submitted but unfunded PEP proposal for this year’s RFP process. We didn’t write the original and substantially rewrote the narrative. It was funded for about $1.5 million over five years, perhaps in part because this PEP client took our advice on which program elements should be included. In addition, the project concept was unique in that it involved providing services to elementary-age children in private schools and public high school students.

In other words, the concept was different, and in grant writing, different is often good because it wakes the reviewers up. I used PEP as my example in the old post, however, not because of the project concept issue, but because funding decisions for this program are particularly opaque. As I wrote then, getting any grant proposal funded is more than telling a compelling story—a submitted proposal has to be technically correct and the applicant has to be lucky with respect to a whole host of factors, like geography, applicant believability, need, mood of the reviewers and similar stuff.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago. We wrote a proposal earlier this year for another Department of Education program: Educational Opportunity Centers (EOC). In this case, the proposal one was point shy of a perfect score and was still not funded. I’m not sure why because this client provides a range of wraparound supportive services for at-risk youth and young adults in a very economically disadvantaged part of a large city (another free proposal phrase) and we’ve written many funded grants for the organization over the years. The Executive Director was incredulous, as was I, and I could not offer her any solace—other than the grant making process often appears random, even though it is not random to the funders, who always have reasons, other than the stated ones, for making the decisions they do.

Last year, however the randomness of the grant making process, however, worked in this client’s favor. We wrote a Department of Energy Recovery Act – Weatherization Assistance Program Training Centers proposal for her. The grant was funded for $1,000,000, even though this organization had no real background in weatherization job skills training. All of the other grantees were experienced weatherization job skills training providers, as were probably almost all the other applicants. This means the proposal we wrote stood out from the crowd, like the second PEP client I discussed above.

Now on to my last weird tale for the day. Earlier this year, we wrote a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT—now that’s a mouthful) program. Despite the odd name, TAACCT (rhymes with cat…?) is really just a vocational training program for community colleges.

What’s interesting about TAACCT is that the underlying federal legislation and regulations specify that at least one TAACCCT grant is supposed to be made in every state—but grants were only awarded in 33 states. So much for regs! The proposal we wrote was for a consortium of community colleges in a suburban area near a collection of very large cities and urban counties. Our client was politically very well connected, the project concept was also fairly unusual, and the proposal technically correct. Seems like the odds should have been pretty good. In this state, only one TAACCCT grant award was made: to a tiny community college in a rural area. My guess is that the Department of Labor received several grants from the big cities and other entities in which our client was located and decided not to fund any of them, choosing instead to fund an obscure rural college—that way, all the big city applicants would be equally mad.

While all of these tales may make you laugh or cry, they should not prevent your organization from applying for grants. Since one cannot know which organizations will manage to submit technically correct proposals, how program officers will interpret regs, or much of anything else, all you can do is decide to apply and submit the best proposal you can—and submit it on time.

Think of how delighted the small community college was at beating out much bigger institutions. Or how great our client felt when she got the news about the Weatherization grant. Clients new and old often ask me to handicap the odds of a particular proposal being funded and I always tell them, “I am a grant writer, not a fortune teller.” Go after the grants your organization wants and needs, disregarding oddsmakers, soothsayers and the The Voice of Doom.