Grantwriting with FSD

Ah, remember that grant I was working on several months ago? Hoping to get funding for a Celebrating Families! spinoff in Argentina? Well, I finally submitted it to FSD. The process is meant to be equally educational as helpful, so it's a little different than typical grant proposals to foundations.

It's submitted through our local site team, and must be based around sustainability. I had this part made, as education is typically considered very sustainable. However, I'm weak at selling my ideas, so this part took a lot of effort. (I spent the entire month of January writing my proposal—a request for just $500.)

Once the grant is submitted, your project may be fully funded, partially funded, a re-write may be requested, or it may be rejected. If the evaluating committee feels some piece of the project is a poor use of funds, they'll choose not to fund that portion. If they think the idea is promising, but they're not 100% sold on certain aspects, they can request a re-write, to clarify those aspects.

In regards to my project, a re-write was requested. I'd under-emphasized a few aspects of the project, such as the universal nature of the themes (showing the project could translate across cultures) and the fact that it had been replicated by other cultures (especially Hispanic populations) successfully.

It takes at least a week for the committee to respond to any submission, so I found the request for a re-write a little frustrating. I waited a week to get the re-write request, another week to find out what needed to be re-written, and then submitted it a few days later, where I'm still waiting for a final answer.

The grant proposal was also a lot of work, for just $500 (dollars), honestly, the hardest I've ever worked for so little money. (Although it comes close to the summer I spent baby-sitting full-time for $2/hour.)

So, the project has been delayed, and I've been killing a lot of time at work, waiting...