By Katalin Wishart, Senior Grantwriter What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think “affordable housing”? For 7-year-old Natasha, it means living in a supportive environment where she receives one-on-one and small-group help with her homework. For her younger sister, it means access to preschool, and for their mom, it means academic [...]
Lisa Cirincione, Senior Resource Development Associate at Joining Vision and Action Congress has developed a habit of using continuing resolutions (CRs) as a stop-gap funding measure to keep the government open. While a CR is a useful tool when a government shutdown is looming because Congress cannot agree on a long-term spending bill, CRs were [...]
Lisa Cirincione, Senior Resource Development Associate at Joining Vision and Action I recently finished working on a grant proposal that had such a restricted page length that I spent as many hours cutting language as I did writing the narrative in the first place. In my 16 years of writing grant proposals, I have learned [...]
Lisa Cirincione, Senior Resource Development Associate at Joining Vision and Action Lately, I am at a complete loss about how the “other side” can justify the rightness of many of their actions to themselves and other people. For example, I catch myself thinking things like: “How can people actually believe it’s a good thing to [...]
By Lisa Cirincione, Joining Vision and Action President Donald Trump has released his skinny budget, “America First,” which gives us some broad stroke glimpses of where he would like Congress to approve cuts to domestic, discretionary programs in the 2018 fiscal year. At a high level, it will squeeze federal grant programs, which have already [...]
By Lisa Cirincione, Joining Vision and Action More glimpses, but nothing concrete. Despite hopes that President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress on February 28, 2017, would illuminate what to expect from the federal budget, we still have very little clarity. The big, concerning thing that we did hear the president say before his speech is [...]
Lisa Cirincione, Joining Vision and Action Will the federal grant programs that support our organization’s critical safety net projects be included in President Donald Trump’s budget? That’s the multi-trillion dollar question that JVA is very concerned about. As background, the U.S. spent $4 trillion dollars last year, and about $2.5 trillion of that was used [...]
By Lisa Cirincione, Joining Vision and Action At JVA, we are anxiously speculating about what will happen to critical federal funding in the coming years. While there is no absolute certainty, I am going to try to summarize what we do know. Trump Nominees First, President Donald Trump has nominated people to serve in his [...]
Collin Lessing, Senior Grantwriter, Joining Vision and Action (JVA) Collin Lessing brings more than a decade of experience in communications and marketing to his role as Senior Grantwriter at Joining Vision and Action. Here are Collin's tips for productivity: These are some tips I learned from the Stephen King book "On Writing" that help [...]
By: Lisa Cirincione, Senior Resource Development Associate, Joining Vision and Action When I discover that a grant application requires constrained grant writing (i.e., has word/character counts), a feeling of dread washes over me. Does that happen to you too? I get this feeling because I know that it’s going to take a lot more time [...]
