Notes From the Practice
Short essays on the practice of grant writing: what funders actually read, what nonprofits routinely miss, and what the work looks like when it is done well.
If you lead a nonprofit, run a development team, or write grants for a living, you have almost certainly felt it by now. The applications take longer. The competition is sharper. Funders are asking questions they did not ask two years ago. And the federal money that quietly underwrote so much of the sector through the pandemic years is no longer flowing the way it used to.
There is a sequence most grant writers assume. The program officer opens the proposal. She reads the cover letter, then the executive summary, then the narrative, then the budget, then the appendices. In that order. Front to back. Carefully.
I said yes to almost everything in my first years of practice. A nonprofit would call. We would talk. I would hear the gaps in the program, I would hear the hesitation in the executive director's voice when she described her outcomes, I would hear the board chair describe a theory of change that had not yet been built and I would still say yes, because I wanted the work and because I believed that a well written proposal could compensate for what was not yet in place.
