Grant Writers vs Activists

As I described in The Life Cycle of a Grant, there is an imaginary line that separates grant writers from what I call activists (or doers). I am a grant writer. For me, the greatest thrill is in the writing of the grant. I'm a bona fide dork - I love conducting needs assessments and crafting the perfect sales pitch to convince the grant reviewer that the project design is brilliant. (Sadly, I really am a dork; I even love developing project budgets and implementation time lines.)

The activist is another creature entirely. These folks tend not to care where the money comes from or how it was secured, they just want to get down to the work of solving the problem at hand.

Obviously, we have a symbiotic relationship. Grant writers would be useless were it not for the activists carrying out the proposed programs we write about and the activists would be without the resources to do-good if it weren't for grant writers. In a perfect world, there would be a sea anemone for every clown fish, a grant writer for every do-gooder. But alas, ours is not a perfect world and to some extent, when it comes to grant writers and activists, we all have to be a little bit of both.

For practical purposes, especially in small organizations that lack the resources to pay a professional grant writer like myself, the activist often has to wear the grant writer hat out of necessity. (I find this a travesty.) But, you may be thinking, "why on earth would the grant writer ever need to don the activist's hat?"

This, too, is a matter of practicality. For all my love of the grant writing process and my general disdain for the doing side of things, I have to confess that it's not necessarily my degree in technical writing that makes me a great grant writer, rather it's my graduate degree in project management and my years in the trenches do-gooding that makes my grant writing effective. It all boils down to this - all of the technical writing skill in the world won't craft a great grant proposal if you lack the hands-on experience of implementing a project in the real world.

Given, most of my experience as a do-gooder has been in social services and the lion's share of the successful grants I've written have been in education and infrastructure projects. I have never been a classroom teacher and I have no intention of ever becoming one (I do, however, have experience in infrastructure - I did do a brief stint as a construction worker while I was a poor undergrad and desperate for a buck). So, how does my experience in social work translate into education and infrastructure project know-how?

Knowledge in a specific content area is irrelevant and can be gained quickly and easily; it just takes a little bit of research, asking the right questions and a lot of reading. Asking the right questions is the critical piece that requires some experience (and can save spending a tremendous amount of time on research and reading). Even if it isn't directly related to the project at hand, experience doing is what informs a grant writer's ability to ask the right questions of the folks who will be implementing the specific project they are trying to fund so that the content experts who will be reviewing the grant see that the applicant knows what they're talking about and are competent to successfully implement the project. Without some knowledge of the realities of project implementation, it is almost impossible to ask effective questions that get at the heart of what it will take to pull off the project on time, within budget and with positive results.