Deb Rice: JVA Executive Director Academy training graduate Deb Rice, Executive Director of AccessAfterSchool chatted with JVA about how our Executive Director Academy helped her become a more effective ED. Access AfterSchool, until recently known as Access Roaring Fork, provides after school and summer programs in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys of Western Colorado. These programs keep [...]
Ever feel like these guys? No need to beg, just do the right things. by Janine Vanderburg In my years at Joining Vision and Action, I’ve worked with numerous funders and served as a funder reviewing grant proposals so know exactly how to make sure grant funders approve your proposal. [...]
by Janine Vanderburg Last weekend, a local nonprofit executive emailed me. In charge of his organization’s fundraising program and getting to the place where he could no longer write all the grant proposals, he was thinking of hiring an internal grantwriter. His big question was this: How many grant proposals can one writer be [...]
By Janine Vanderburg, JVA Consulting I have often said that someone with one year of grantwriting experience at JVA Consulting will know more and write more successful proposals than most people with 10 years of experience. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success suggests a reason why our grantwriters are outliers. Natural talent + 10,000 hours [...]
By Camron Bridgford, JVA Consulting As a grantwriter for nonprofit organizations before working at JVA, I deeply (and unfortunately) understand the stress that can come with an impending grant deadline that wasn’t plotted out with enough time to spare. I’ve been there at the 11th hour, frantically attempting to corral numerous employees, budgets, complex [...]
By Lisa Cirincione, Joining Vision and Action Organizing the application If you are going to invest hundreds of hours seeking grant funding, you need to make sure that your application gets noticed favorably by its reviewers. In my 14 years of writing government grants, I am still surprised at how disjointed and repetitive the questions [...]
by Janine Vanderburg, Joining Vision and Action A critical part of successful grantwriting is identifying funders that are a good fit for your organization or programs. We've all had the experience of someone saying, "Oh, you should apply to this foundation—we hear that they are funding children, or the environment, etc." While it might be tempting [...]
by Janine Vanderburg, Founder, Joining Vision and Action How to Write a Grant that Will Get Funded In the 1990s, I stumbled across Eleanor Burns' Make a Quilt in a Day television series. As someone who had spent long hours creating quilts, I was instantly intrigued. The secret, it turned out, was a system of [...]
By Amber Alarid, JVA Consulting As some of you may already know, Grants Manager Camron Bridgford and I recently co-hosted a training with the Denver Office of Strategic Partnerships (DOSP), offering guidance on finding foundation, city, state, and federal funding and securing the right partnerships to create competitive proposals. We were fortunate to be joined [...]
By Meghan Camp Over the holiday season, I met a lot of new people, and when they asked me the inevitable question: “What is it that you do, Meghan?” and I told them I was a grant writer, I got a lot of blank stares. I’ve been working in the social change sector for several [...]
