Earning my keep

I know I've not written an entry in a while. My writing efforts are directed at grant season. My agency is a small, grassroots type organization. We aren't one of those large, foundation based organizations. So, each year, I have to write grants to keep our doors open and staff paid.

My husband teaches, and about this time of year starts getting term papers. I love the many, many reasons students have for not getting their papers written and/or turned in on time. In turn, my husband tells his students about how someday, keeping their jobs may depend upon getting a "term paper" in on time.

Imagine this, if you will. You spend all year doing your job. Getting up in the middle of the night to the blaring of the pager. You attend endless meetings. You generate reports and reports and reports. Then, as if none of that matters, you must reapply for your funding. You must generate an "application" that looks into not just what you accomplished in the past year, but what you promise to accomplish in the coming year. You answer specific questions in limited space. You generate attachments. You chase down board members to sign the application, and assurances you don't discriminate or send your money to terrorists.

There is an art to estimating what you can accomplish in the coming year . . . as well as how much money you will spend. You want to appear to be moving forward without promising to deliver the impossible. At the same time, you want to have reasonable expenses but you don't want to find yourself out of funds before the end of the year. At the same time, how do you estimate how many miles, exactly, you and your staff will travel each week a year from now? And how do you estimate how much you will pay for utilities a year from now?

Then, once you finish the application and double check each page to make sure you don't have glaring errors or gaps. Then, you make copies. The last grant I submitted was 105 pages long and required 13 copies, 3 hole punched. (And, I have one of the smaller grants submitted to this funder because I have only one program I for which I request funds.)

With some grants, a committee reviews what you have submitted. I have found that often the people who serve on these committees may or may not have a personal agenda. Other times, some of the people who serve on these committees don't have specific understanding of what victim service agencies do on a day to day basis. I've had committees ask me why don't we just lobby for women to have a curfew to keep them safe. One year, I had a committee come back and ask why we don't spend equal resources on male victims as female. Let's see . . . last year we had a total of 367 people served . . . of which 20 were male. Say we had a budget of $100,000. I don't see spending $50,000 on 20 victims and $50,000.00 on the other 347 victims.

Because I take seriously my responsibility to be a good steward of public funds, I get really annoyed when other non-profits abuse their funds. Every time a non-profit leader misuses, steals, or fudges their funds . . . all non-profits become objects of suspicion.

Also, it is a lot of pressure to know that other people are counting on me to do a good job on the grants so that they can keep their jobs, possibly get a little raise.

And, I really dislike feeling like I have to compete with other non-profits to keep our doors open. I struggle to walk the fine line between promoting how really good my agency is and not running down other agencies doing this work.