If Only Grants Could Speak, What Tales They Would Tell

I noticed something today. In my imagination, I think of grantwriting as an intuitive, creative pursuit much like writing short stories. In short story writing, there is a form: situation, conflict, resolution, but using that form, myriad variations result. One sort of variation is to complicate each of the three parts, another simply rearranging the three parts, and still another making one or more of the three very short or very long. My point is why does the grant formula seem to remain the same, usually: Summary, Need, Goals&Objectives , Methods, Evaluation, Sustainability, Qualifications and Budget. That’s about it, isn’t it? That’s what my training says, and it is confirmed by the standardized grant application forms, including the on-line recipes. Indeed, they’re all recipes and, unlike the short stories, there is very little variation permitted. That’s why it struck me today that I am a school of one when I change the order, de-emphasize Needs and emphasize Evaluation, for instance. It seems to me that the grant proposal form is open to an extraordinary amount of variation. I have concluded that the standardized order is superfluous in describing a project and making the description passionate, concise, logical, and truthful. Am I a school of one when I claim that my proposals are just as good as yours, even though you follow the formulae like a straight highway between here and there, and I don’t?

I ask myself who invented this form. I can testify that it has been around since 2001, when I took my first grantwriting workshop from the Foundation Center. I must go to the library to see if there are books that pre-date that. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were none. In fact, I have made it one of my jobs to research this question, and I have come up with zip. There are no books about grantwriting written before 2000. It’s as if the field appeared from the forehead of Zeus. Could it be that someone put together the whole “discipline” of grantwriting and thereafter, teaching it to fledgling grantwriters, made it gospel? I must ask one of these people. I know a few.

My point is to ask why we are so hide bound when it comes to writing proposals, yet most books proclaim that it is somehow creative. It is no more creative than writing a business contract, which also has a standardized beginning, middle and end. If you leave out any of the parts you risk, unlike the grant proposal, coming in conflict with the courts if there is ever a business dispute. Maybe that is the creative wiggle room in grant writing. Maybe that is where the mastery of the spirit applies as the poet’s metaphor has it). I wish. Instead, all I get, year after year, is the same topic order, even the same word order, especially if you listen to the scholars of the discipline.

Let me conclude with an optimistic thought. Like most pursuits involving the intellect, the information services business has evolved in the past generation. I believe, therefore, that the next generation of grantwriters will throw off the chains of their teachers and predecessors. Along with their cohorts in philanthropy, grantwriters will develop new ways to communicate. Not simply better, but more creative. After all, reading is not so difficult, if you accept that we all have our own ways of communicating.