How do I apply for grants?

[La Texican]

PBS is advertising a traveling museum that takes $150,000 worth of museum dinosaur pieces to your school and gives your kids a professional lecture. Our community is not in museum frequenting vicinity so this would be a wonderful opportunity for the community to bring this to the kids.

 

I want to help make it happen. Any suggestions on where or how to find grants? Of course I'm off to google but I stopped here to ask as well.

[Bang!Zoom!]

Many school systems have professional grant-writers (or at least the skills) to do this.

 

I'd call the district office and ask who normally deals with it (if any) and start making connections at that level.

 

You might also want to attend one of the school board meetings and make a pitch for the program.

[slackermom]

Our school relies on grants to pay a lot of the bills.

 

First, you want to be sure you have the school administration's support for the program and/or grant. You will generally need one or more teachers to sign off on the proposal stating how the school will use the grant. Grant applications also tend to ask for a bunch of demographic information which the school can provide. Depending on the population of the school, many programs will discount or waive normal costs.

 

We have had success with local universities who regularly provide grants. You could try banks, professional organizations/clubs, and non-profits that give funds to schools. Also, businesses such as Target and Home Depot do grants, though those often cover merchandise rather than money. Sometimes that works out to free up money for something else the school needs.

[La Texican]

Thank you for your advice. I emailed our school principal mentioning the traveling museum that PBS advertised, what it cost, and that I was interested in trying to find grants to bring it to our school. I would need her support for any grant proposals I were to write. I would need demographic information for the school, including free or reduced lunch information, that I would like to meet with the school board on a district level to find if there's someone who writes grant proposals at that level to guide me. She answered that she would support me in this effort and appreciates that I want to help the school. I should schedule a meeting with her next week to start planning. Thanks ladies for helping me take the first steps.