15: Grant Writing for Consultants 101
- Page ID
- 132178
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Andrea Solarz
I never planned to become a grant writer, and in many respects I am an unlikely grant writer. Although trained in research (with a doctorate in community psychology), I am not based in a university setting and I have not conducted research since graduate school (beyond a survey here or there). Nor do I have any direct experience working in community-based organizations. Nonetheless, grant writing has become my most important “bread and butter” skill as a consultant, and the great majority (I estimate over 80%) of the proposals I’ve written have been funded.
My first foray into grant writing was by happenstance—a colleague at an organization where I had previously been employed, asked if I might have time to help him with writing a grant proposal. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, our successful collaboration convinced me that I did not want to go back to a traditional job, and that I had marketable skills that would allow me to make a living as a consultant. Since that time, I’ve written more than twenty funding proposals. It’s an activity that I have come to enjoy, both because it taps into a nice combination of my skill sets (e.g., my science writing skills, analytical skills, and project development skills) and because of the exhilaration—some might call it terror—that inevitably comes in those last hours before the final proposal has to be submitted to the funding agency.
In this chapter, I will discuss my approach to proposal writing, as well as some of the knowledge, skills, and experiences that are useful for being a successful grant proposal writer. These comments of course reflect my own experiences, which have been almost exclusively with national organizations. Although much of what I say can be generalized to working with smaller community-based organizations, national organizations tend to have access to more resources (including national networks of experts) than do local organizations, a factor that can increase their competitiveness for funding (of course, they are also more likely to be competing against other more resource-rich entities, which elevates the bar for their proposals being rated highly). I also note that this chapter will not address the technical aspects of writing a grant proposal (e.g., how to write goals and objectives, how to write an evaluation plan). There are plenty of resources out there that provide this information (some of which are listed in Appendix 15-1), and I encourage the reader to explore them.