English 654: Literacy, Diversity, and Technology
Spring 2015
For this collaborative multiple grants writing project, you will work in small groups of two to write grant proposals for our host organization. Together, you will identify some potential funding agencies; locate, research, interpret and respond to their RFPs; and thus prepare preliminary drafts of proposals. My expectation is that you will move through writing process and producing fairly polished drafts for your target agencies. Your writing process will be closely monitored and supported with resources and feedback from me and the designated grant writers from our host organization. As you complete your projects, you will submit your final drafts to me and the designated official from partner organization. Our expectation is that you will write grants that can be submitted to related funders with some or no further work, and any money generated by this partnership will go towards funding some new or ongoing projects of this great organization. This organization works with vulnerable population and around very sensitive issues. Therefore, being able to support its noble cause in some ways will be a remarkable achievement in itself.
First step in the assignment for you is to go through description and action plans of projects this organization has in file. I encourage you to choose something you are interested in. After you decide on the projects, next step for you will be to research, identify, and contact potential funders for those projects. After that, you will look at the RFPs, gather needed info/data, and start writing the grant in the format/structure outlined by the funding agencies. Your writing process will be supported by classroom discussion on, among other things, components of grant proposal, grant writing conventions, strategies of writing persuasive grant proposals, peer feedback, and close work with me and the grant writing unit of our host organization. By the end of the semester, you will produce multiple proposals for small and medium grants that host organization can submit to potential funders.
We have agreed that we will use reviewers’ evaluation criteria to assess your projects. In most cases, RFPs also include evaluation criteria, and we will use them to determine whether your drafts are polished enough to be submitted to target funding agencies. My understanding with host organization is that I will not assess the projects alone, but we will collaborate in their evaluation. Using reviewer’s criteria, we will determine whether you adhered to funder’s directions/guidelines, whether your proposals are persuasive to us and to the reviewers, whether your proposals include required components of non-profit grant proposal, including detailed action plan, budget, and plan for evaluation of project outcomes, and so on.
