Today’s Plan:
- Review Team Assignments
- What Do We Know About Grant Writing?
- Analyzing a Grant Application
- For Next Class
Review Team Assignments
What Do We Know About Grant Writing?
I preparation for today’s class I asked you to read Lesson 6 and 7 of Karsh and Fox’s Grant Writing Book. Those rules are:
- Make an Outline
- Write as you Speak
- Don’t be overly formal or pretentious
- Don’t be too casual
- Be clear, direct, factual
- Double and Triple Think Your Choice of Words
- Avoid all slang
- “We also believe you must take great care in describing, precisely, the traits and attributes of the people who participate in your program and/or who live in your community or city” (123-24)
- Don’t Exaggerate
- Avoid hyperbolic adjectives (the best, cutting edge, etc)
- Let facts speak for themselves
- Buy a Grammar Book
- Double check EVERY apostrophe
- Double check EVERY comma
- Double check every verb for a tense shift
- Double check every introductory clause for agreement (“While riding a bus, the tornado ripped through our town”)
- Buy a Dictionary and a Thesaurus
- It is helpful to explore the precise meaning of terms and avoid too much repetition
- LET ME EXERCISE CAUTION
- Stick to the Active Voice
- Williams and Bizup every sentence
- Keep Your Own Voice Out of It
- Avoid judgments, controversial ideas, political views, and humor
- NO. SARCASM.
- Limit the Adjectives
- It’s Not Personal
- When possible, avoid I, we, and our in favor of specific references
- NO ACRONYMS
- Prove It!
- Evidence-based claims
To this list we can add a few of the driving ideas in Lesson 7: that a grant emphasize how it offers a solution to a problem or a strategy to address a particular need (pg. 139). Describe a clear target population (pg. 142). Have a sufficient but no overwhelming amount of research (pg. 145-146). What kinds of material can be considered research?
- Community demographics
- Anecdotal Information (“Can put a human face on a cold statistical problem”)
- Focus Groups
- Needs assessment [major project]
- Newspaper reports
- Police Precinct Data
- School reading/math/attendance rates
- Hospital and health department statistics
- Scholarly Literature
Analyzing a Grant Application
Let’s put that rubric to work.
For Next Class
Grant Team: Our library has links/subscriptions to a number of useful services. It is time to divide and conquer. We need to dive into this SPIN database and see what we can dig up. Give me 45 minutes of your time.
Here’s one more thing we might want to examine, the Council of Foundations
.
Peer Organizations Team: First, we need a list of organizations that work in re-entry, restorative justice, rehabilitation, etc. Let’s work on that. There’s a search engine for that. How many terms can we think off? How can we split up this work? Give me 45 minutes of your time, too.
Research Team: We need to generate a list of potential research articles. I have loosely organized our document by topic. Let’s put together a list of articles useful for our grant projects.
