What It Really Takes to Write a Grant & Who Shouldn't be Expected to Do It

A school administrator once asked me, "why can't we just have the English teachers write grants?" Six weeks later, once I had adequately recovered from my stroke, I replied, "I see. You've never written a grant. Allow me to educate you a bit on my profession."

It is common in organizations, especially among board members and other individuals not intimately involved in day-to-day operations, to have no concept of what actually goes into preparing a grant proposal. It is not uncommon for a single proposal to require 80-160 work hours to complete. Further, the amount of time required to complete a proposal is not necessarily proportionate to the amount of funding requested; it can take just as long to write a $30K proposal as it takes to write a $3M proposal. In short, grant proposals aren’t something you just dash off on a Tuesday evening and mail Wednesday morning.

That being said, contrary to the practices of many organizations, you can’t expect someone to turn around an 80-hour grant proposal in two weeks and do their 40+ hour day job. I feel genuinely sorry for the executive directors and program managers and all the other over-worked, under-paid do-gooders out there who are subjected to the unrealistic expectation that they squeeze grant writing into their "down time."