When you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, the most popular answers include police officer, nurse, teacher and firefighter.
But did you ever hear a child say, “I want to grow up to be a grant writer?”
As a professional activity, grant writing is often overlooked and underappreciated. It’s a bit like being a sausage-maker, in the sense that most people don’t want to know how the sausage is made. Nevertheless, civil servants and public safety professionals are regularly tasked with finding ways to serve the public efficiently and with limited resources — inevitably leading them to writing public and private grants. They may find themselves bridging a gap between their chosen profession and grant writing, which is more akin to the academic exercise of research paper writing than public safety.
Straddling the Line
In her article on grant-writing in higher education, Kay Cunningham points out how grant writing blurs the lines between professional and academic skills: “Grant writers, whether their role falls predominantly under an academic or an administrative job description, are an example of a third space professional, requiring skills that transgress institutional and historically rigid professional boundaries. The knowledge and skills required of the grant writer exist in the hinterland between the academic and administrative worlds, requiring input from both to produce high quality grant applications.” If you swap out “academic” with “public safety” or “civil service,” you get a good idea of how grant writing works in law enforcement, fire service, corrections, city government and other public service agencies.
The childhood dream of saving people from burning buildings, protecting the public from criminals, nursing patients back to health or teaching children their ABCs can be overshadowed by the need to develop these grant writing skills. When budgets fail to support the needs of an organization, the person tasked with supplementing tax-based funding often has to learn new skills in order to provide much-needed services and infrastructure for their agency. They become, in essence, an “accidental grant writer.”
Interestingly, the training that makes someone an efficient civil servant or public safety professional often translates well into an effective grant writer or manager. Take the National Incident Management System (NIMS) model for emergency response, for instance. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “Every day, jurisdictions and organizations work together to share resources, integrate tactics, and act collaboratively.” Grant writers and managers who apply these principles are more likely to be successful at obtaining funding to maximize resources and better serve their communities.
Grant Writers as Problem Solvers
Grants are used to solve problems. To solve problems, you need a team.
Like emergency personnel working under NIMS, a grant writing team needs to work together, share information, craft goals and objectives, and delegate responsibilities to develop well-written grant proposals. While assembling your team, imagine the grant has already been awarded. Ask yourself who will need to be engaged to get the work done and include those individuals in the writing of the narrative and strategy portions of the grant.
Here are a few tips to help you along the way:
1. Identify the talent you need to be successful. Determine who is needed for writing, reviewing, information sharing, procurement, data management, reporting and closeout of grants. The people who may be needed the most are often the least experienced in the grant management process. Indeed, this can be intimidating. To ease personnel fears, provide as much information as possible about the expectations regarding a potential team member’s involvement in the process. This will avoid miscommunication and encourage collaboration for the best final product.
2. Assign roles and tasks. Assigning roles for quarterly reporting, data collection and grant audits is crucial to successful grant management. Make sure everyone knows what they need to do and when they need to do it. Establishing timelines is critical.
3. Be organized. Organize data and create checklists and policies to help non-grant employees to be efficient and engaged. Especially if timelines are tight, develop data sharing and backup procedures so everyone has access to the information they need to efficiently respond. Keeping information in silos works against efficiently managing the grant process.
4. Give grace. If you are the team leader (or the “incident commander”), recognize that not everyone on the team is comfortable working on grants. The bureaucracy can be intimidating. Give grace and be supportive of each other. If your agency misses a grant deadline or reporting date, another opportunity will come along. Granting agencies rarely revoke or cancel grants for one minor misstep. Establishing relationships with grant agencies helps when you need to communicate problems and complications.
5. Celebrate the achievement. Along the road to completing the project, be sure to take every opportunity to celebrate the milestones. Submitting the grant, receiving the funding award, completing the reports, closing out the grants — these are all important achievements that should be shared and applauded, because grants can be hard.
Grant Management from Start to Finish
It goes without saying that the collaboration shouldn’t stop when the grant application is submitted. Writing the grant is often just the beginning. What happens when you get the funding?
Everyone is always thrilled when they are notified they received grant funding. But this is where bureaucracy can become even more difficult. Optimally, the team you built to write the grant should help manage the grant as well. This is the grant management phase of the project, where the team members need to remain engaged, communicate and keep the project moving to completion.
Accidental grant writers are the professionals who not only choose a vocation but also step outside boundaries of their traditional professional roles to find funding when it is needed most. They find creative, optimistic and alternate ways to solve problems by building teams, collaborating with others and bridging the gap between their profession and administration as a third space professional.
Regardless of what you aspired as a child to become, when you chose to serve the public you probably wanted to make a difference, solve problems and serve your community. Welcome to the “third space,” accidental grant writer. With patience and diligence, you’ll be able to continue your mission by securing much-needed funding for your organization.
If you’re an “accidental grant writer” and need assistance, Lexipol’s team of expert grant professionals and project managers can position you for success to help fund your organization’s needs.
