Grants can be a godsend to solve financial shortcomings for non-profit and educational organizations. However, two major stumbling blocks are associated with attaining grants: locating them and writing them.
Before your search even begins, you must have a project that you wish to fund. What is it that you want to accomplish? Any project you support must align with the needs of your organization. Grant providers want to clearly see the necessity of your program or project. To make sure that your project fulfills a need, compare what you have now to what you feel your organization needs or should have. Use this information to create possible solutions. The upfront time spent investigating this chasm between your reality and your vision for it will pay off when it comes time to write your grant proposal. Do some preliminary research to find a solid basis for your idea. Map out the steps necessary to complete your project including necessary funding at each step. Remember throughout your design phase to keep in mind how you will evaluate your project using measurable outcomes.
Make a preliminary project worksheet concerning what you believe you will need for your project. By doing this, you can get a clear picture of what the grant you are searching for must look like. Some items your chart could include are:
* Project Overview
* Need for Project
* Research Sources
* Amount Needed
* Special Circumstance
* Evaluation Methods
The most important piece of advice you can get when beginning your grant search is to carefully match your project with the grantor's award requirements; don't change your organization to fit the grant, find the grant that fits your organization. For example, if the desired grant is only given to schools in inner cities, only apply if you meet that criterion. Otherwise, you'll be wasting your time. With that in mind, three major sources for grant money exist: Federal and State Governments, Private Foundations, and Corporations. Each has its own agenda and differing levels of requirements concerning who can apply, the application process itself, how the money must be spent, and the methods of evaluation.
Grant writing is time consuming, but worth the effort! Actually finding funding sources can sometimes be the hardest part. SO, before you begin the search, develop your preliminary project worksheet, this helps define your paramenters and is the first step to finding the most appropriate funding sources.
