Before we can do anything else in this class, we need to establish why each of you will be writing a grant. You might have come into this class with an idea about this, or you might have no clue. This assignment is designed to help you consider all possibilities and find a path forward. As you build toward a grant proposal over the course of this semester, you will be refining the persona and organizational affiliation you craft here.
Possibilities
- A current or future employer may present opportunities for grantwriting. You might find it useful to describe an organization you currently work for or explore and describe the organization you hope to work for to consider how grant funding might benefit the institution. You can do this drawing on information from actual organizations or you can be creative and imagine an organization (perhaps a dream job where you get to serve as a grantwriter?).
- An academic discipline can be seen as an organization in need of funding and you can apply to undertake research to advance that discipline. If you want to take this approach, one very specific grant program you could apply to in this class would be SURF. **ACTUAL GRANT YOU COULD GET**
- As a student at the University of New Haven, you are intimately acquainted with the institution and its needs. You might want to think about proposing a grant in collaboration with faculty or staff on campus, or on behalf of an RSO at the university (this could be tricky without long-term employee partners, but it’s worth exploring if you’re interested!).
- Global or local crises have given rise to many non-profit organizations. One you might be hearing about often now in this midst of the crisis in Afghanistan is No One Left Behind. You might want to search for non-profits that share your values or you might want to imagine a non-profit you would like to create and then write a grant proposal that will support the organization’s mission.
- For the creatively inclined, an entire grant proposal written in response to an actual RFP (request for proposals) by a fictional person (or an impersonated real person) for a fictional organization (or an impersonated real organization) could be extremely rich. Challenging, but fun.
- Other ideas? Run them by me!
Questions to Answer
As mentioned above, for the purposes of this course, you will be refining a persona and an organizational affiliation to use as you write a grant proposal. So, for the purposes of our semester-long project of writing a grant proposal (and with the knowledge that you can absolutely change your mind as we move forward!):
- Who are you?
- What organization or discipline are you applying on behalf of?
- What do you want to accomplish for this organization or discipline?
Source Material
Even if you’re creating an imaginary non-profit, you will need to ground your creation in real needs and specific details. This will require considerable research. As is the case with grant proposals, you need to ensure that your sources are reliable and you must reference them in your work. Please select a citation style to follow as you reference this source material. For this assignment, you can use the citation style most familiar to you (common styles include MLA, APA, and Chicago). You will have an opportunity to check the reliability of your sources in class, and I encourage you to learn more about Zotero and join our course group to share your sources.
Format of Submission
Please compose a Word document that answers the questions above and cites all sources referenced. You can submit this document through Canvas. We will discuss as a class the possibility of publishing this and other assignments as posts on our course website if you all would like to share your projects with each other.
