Does anyone do grant writing?

[mum]

I'm taking a class on grant writing in the fall. Does anyone here write grants? How does it pay? Could I make a pet time job out of this?

[Dmmetler]

I used to be the primary grant writer for my PS-it was the only way I had any sort of music classroom materials at all, and once my principal discovered I was good at it, he found funds in the schedule to give me a block of time to write grants for various projects. No idea how it pays as an actual job, though.

 

You need a really good knowledge of how to spin what you want to do in a way that fits the model of the funding organization, and you also need a strong awareness that grant writing is a game and sometimes you win, sometimes you lose-but if you don't know the rules going in, you're not going to win. So if the grantor really, really likes whole language, you probably won't get funding for OG phonics training for teachers-but you may be able to get funding for musical instruments to use to orchestrate poetry.

[Eliz]

Hope you get some answers.  I would love to know more about grant writing as well.  

[Ethel Mertz]

I did grant writing full time for a year for the development office of a major university about 20 years ago. I made a competitive salary with benefits. I also did some grant writing for a non-profit in the same time frame and was successful at getting grants. For the latter, however, it was a very small part of my job. I don't know anything about the current job market for grant writers. There are so many different contexts for grant writing that I would think you would need to be very knowledgeable about the field for which you were writing a grant: e.g., corporate vs nonprofit, the arts, social service agencies, academic grants of all sorts, secular vs religious institutions...  Do you have any idea in which area you would focus your grant writing?

[Hyacinth]

I looked into this at one point. Many nonprofits use volunteer grant writers.

 

One exec that I spoke with said that if the organization is already operating on a shoestring budget, it is hard to justify paying an outside person to maybe get the organization more funding. He found it better to ask someone on the board or on staff who knows the organization well to tackle fundraising projects such as grant research/writing. He didn't see it as a feasible part-time, freelance gig.

 

(Just one dude's opinion . . . hopefully others will have more optimistic insights.) 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 1, 2016 by Hyacinth

[katilac]

I looked into this at one point. Many nonprofits use volunteer grant writers.

 

One exec that I spoke with said that if the organization is already operating on a shoestring budget, it is hard to justify paying an outside person to maybe get the organization more funding. He found it better to ask someone on the board or on staff who knows the organization well to tackle fundraising projects such as grant research/writing. He didn't see it as a feasible part-time, freelance gig.

 

(Just one dude's opinion . . . hopefully others will have more optimistic insights.) 

 

On the other hand, it's really tough to get volunteers to research and write grants, because it's a really hard job - you have to know what you're doing, it's time-consuming, lots of rejection, etc. 

 

I worked for two different national non-profits before kids, and all grant writing was done in-house. Volunteers might be helping or occasionally taking the lead, but staff was ultimately responsible for signing off. ime, that was the case for most well established organizations, but that was nearly 20 years ago. 

 

I do see the occasional ad for part-time fundraisers and grant writers locally. Not free-lance, but part-time. You will definitely make less with entry-level and part-time, but it's a way to gain experience and get some grants under your belt. Doing it as a volunteer will of course also help gain experience. 

[TianXiaXueXiao]

Most of my career before quitting my job 3 years ago to do full time sahm/hs was spent as a grant writer. It's possible to be a consulting grant writer and you can charge $50 per hour and more in my neck of the woods, but you often only will get paid an agreed upon portion for your time until successful grant award which will not occur for every grant application unless you work with an ngo that has revolving funds. You will need to have some major successes before anyone will hire you so you'll need to do your first few as a volunteer (and they need to be successfully awarded) unless you are doing them as part of your current job which is paying you.