I have worked for nonprofits for years and have been involved in all the various aspects of grant writing, from grant reviewing and writing grant proposals, to reporting to agencies on the uses, the financials, and the outcomes of the grants. I am glad to share what I know, and there is ALWAYS more to learn for all of us as the grant environment is constantly changing.

I've found the best way to learn grant writing is to take tiny bites at a time. Therefore, we will deal with different tiny parts of grant writing, and in the end, we will put together all that we have learned and you can have a review and comments on how to strengthen your grant proposal idea. Once you have one good grant proposal idea in hand, it can serve as a template for a lot of your grant writing. Keep in mind that you will always be tailoring it to fit the specific needs of the next project or the next need as well as the requirements of the grantor. Let's get started

Grantwriting seems like a truly complex subject that everyday people could never possibly understand. But the reality is that grant writing is an everyday skill that anyone willing to take the time and do the necessary work can learn. There are many types of grants and one of the first keys is finding the right kind of grant for your specific needs. Luckily there are many good tools out there to help us with that task. Make up your mind that if you really want to get a grant, you are going to have to some research to find just the right kind of grant for yourself, though I will point you in the right direction.

Tools that will help you in your search are some mega search engines that search through many smaller search engines such as Google.com and Yahoo.com. Two especially good ones are:

1) WebCrawler - http://www.webcrawler.com

2) Profusion - http://www.profusion.com

Now that you have the search engines, you will be looking for " Grants for individuals," or " Grants for physically challenged individuals." If you have identified the purpose for your grant (i.e. to do an art project), you can also search under that (i.e. "Grants to complete art projects"). Get the idea? More search words gets more results. A search on WebCrawler for grants to start a new business revealed 94 entries, and Profusion turned up 36 results. Before you get all excited and dive in, a warning to all of you . There are companies on the web who are out to make money off YOU! So when you search for grants, remember that if a web site that offers grants (or says it does) sounds too good, it probably is. If they want personal information from you in order to give you information, in general, be very careful and ask me first if you are not sure. Also, some sites come up that have nothing at all to do with grants. It's all part of the Big Search!

So your first assignment is just to familiarize yourself with what is generally available. It should help you also to get an idea of the kinds of ventures that are and are not funded.

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