By Madeline Bodin
You have a great idea for a book, a longform narrative article or an investigative piece, but the payment the publisher offers won’t cover the cost of the project. I’ve been there, and so have many NASW members. Skimpy funding doesn’t have to mean the end of the project, though. There are grants, fellowships, and other resources available to help you turn great ideas into reality. The problem is that Google doesn’t offer much help finding those opportunities and neither does Bing. But a new database from NASW can get you started.
As a NASW member with both experience in looking for funding for and training in grant writing, I knew that a funding database would be a valuable resource for other members. I applied to the Ideas Fund, but what the project most needed was a capable database programmer, and NASW already has that resource in Cybrarian Russell Clemings. The NASW website guest editor program let me work with Russ for three months to create the database.
The specific information included on each grant or fellowship is based on a class on grant writing I took from Diane Silver (dianesilver.net), a grant writer with nearly two decades of experience who has written grants that have brought millions of dollars to the institutions that hire her.
Silver says that grant writing is not that different from science writing. “The first thing I learned as a grant writer is to take your audience into consideration, and you really have to do that as a science writer,” she says. When writing a grant, your audience is the funding organization. “Each funding agency is different. They each have different needs, different quirks,” Silver says.
The link to further information about the funding organization in the database is your connection to the needs and quirks of that organization. When writing your grant proposal, present your project in a way that makes sense to that organization’s particular world view and needs, Silver says. If the funder’s world view is incompatible with your project, don’t apply, she warns. “If your project is about climate change and you have a foundation that’s given money to climate change deniers, you are wasting your time.”
Examining which projects have already been funded — which is also included in the database — will also help you target a likely funder. You want to see projects like yours, but not exactly like yours. Silver says that, like magazines, funders don’t want to repeat themselves.
Unlike magazines though, most funders encourage you to call or email a program representative to discuss your project before you write the proposal. These conversations can provide valuable insight into how your project stacks up in the eyes of the funder, plus provide additional information, including updates to what’s on the website, Silver says.
The database also includes the names of past awardees. If someone you know has won a grant that you are interested in, they can be another source of inside information, or, if you see the names of writers who are completely out of your league, that may be a hint that the funding opportunity may be as well.
Some funders are quirky about deadlines. They only post the deadline on their website a few weeks ahead of time. Personally, I need more time than that. And if I’m planning a book project, I’m thinking in terms of years, not weeks. The deadline in the database may be last year’s, but it is a good cue to when the next deadline will be.
The database has over 130 entries, and they take a fairly liberal definition of science writing. The database includes funding for radio, documentary film, and website creation. There is information about state arts council grants which often fund non-fiction projects only once in a several-year grant cycle and generally fund some seriously arty stuff. But every state arts council literature program manager that I called practically swooned over the idea of funding a project like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, so they may be worth a try.
There are all sorts of fellowships included in the database. Some, like the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, give you money to work on a single project for six months or a year. Most, however, involve funders who want to teach you something and are offering training of some sort — a class, workshop, tour, seminar — that lasts anywhere from a weekend to several months.
The database also includes some grants and fellowships that are no longer offered. To save you time, for some particularly good opportunities, I’ve included information about what the opportunity used to offer, plus a few words about its status — whether the program has ended, is on hiatus, or its future is completely uncertain. The program websites sometimes don’t have this information.
One of several helpful features Russell Clemings was able to program into the database is a sort feature that lets you click on “Deadline” any time you are on a page with entry summaries, and those summaries will be sorted by deadline. This lets you see what deadlines are coming up and which you just missed.
You can also sort those summary lists by stipend amount or alphabetically by name.
Another valuable feature is the ability to search by grant or fellowship name, or by a keyword found in summaries and descriptions. For example, if you want to go to Antarctica and are wondering how to get there, type “Antarctica” in the search box on the right-hand side of the database’s home page. Hit the “Apply” button, and the three Antarctic programs in the database will be listed.
When you access the full entry for a grant or fellowship, you will find a “comment” link at the very bottom of the page. That wasn’t left there by accident. My hope is that as members use the database, they will add information to it. The best way to keep the database up to date is for members to add and correct information as they research their own projects. You are also welcome to leave tips and opinions. The database is only available to members, which I hope will protect the comments from random trolls.
Each of those 130-odd funding entries should be a source of hope for that important but underfunded project — even if you don’t succeed in getting the funding or training the first time through.
Silver says, “When I talk to funders, they all say, ‘Don’t give up.’ So many people apply; you never know how close you’ve gotten.”
For more about Diane Silver’s grant writing classes, visit dianesilver.net.
Madeline Bodin is a science writer specializing in wildlife conservation and the environment.
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