Grant Me Strength.
I haven’t been blogging all that much the past few weeks, and I’d like to apologize to my readers. Fact is, I’ve been up to my neck in a federal grant at work. It’s taken up the majority of my time, and in fact there are three other grants that are almost done that have sat idle for the past three weeks.
Ordinarily, I love writing grants. Most of the time it’s a pretty easy procedure, and boils down to a 1-5 page explanation of “why you should give us money”, followed by a budget explaining how the money will be spent, and various attachments like annual reports, proof of our nonprofit status, organizational budgets, and a list of our directors. Best of all, a lot of foundations in take what’s known as a “common form”, a standard template on which to base your funding request. In Philadelphia, the Delaware Valley Grantmakers Common Grant Application is popular. Using this template, you can literally send out a dozen grants a day. The three grants laying idle I mentioned in the first paragraph? All DVG forms. They’ll go out in one big batch, and next week I’ll send out three more. The form has certainly helped me perform really well for someone who has no background in the grantwriting.
However, the few times I have had to deal with the federal govenrment for funding, it has been nothing short of a nightmare. Did I say nightmare? I meant weeks and weeks of the kind bureaucratic hell that Kafka captured so well. The last time we applied for a grant from the feds, from the President’s Compassion Capital Fund, the process took about two weeks, and was precise to the point of anal retention. Entries must be in 18 point Times new Roman Font, double-spaced, except for the cover page which must be 12-point Arial font, blue and single spaced. Budget must include all previous years dating back to 1945 if applicable. Grantwriter must wear purple hat with green feather when entering questions six (6), seven (7), and nine (9), and the red hat with the yellow feather but also the purple hat too but not the purple hat when answering questions eight (8), nine (9), and six (6) but also not including seven (7).
Not only did the feds not fund our proposal, they sent us a letter explaining in great detail why we were not selected. In sneering tones, the letter included every single error, no matter minor, including several that were actually the direct result of following the application instructions.
So when I learned about three weeks ago that we’d be applying for a federal grant, I blanched. I’m not going to go into the topic of the grant itself: I try to leave particulars of my job off this blog. But to give you broad strokes, the federal government is offering up to $300,000-some dollars, over three years to domestic violence prevention. It’s a lot of money. It would really have an impact. But I knew that applying for the money would involve a rigamarole of hoops and insane requirements, but even more fun because we’d be required to apply online. Surfin’ the Internets. Usin’ the Google. Did I just hear thunder?
Where to begin? Where the hell to begin?
The federal government has tried to simplify a number of its systems, to expected results. One of these efforts is Grants.gov, “a central storehouse for information on over 1,000 grant programs and access to approximately $400 billion in annual awards.” And by “central”, they handle everything from a to z, bombs to zoos.
In order to apply for a grant a Grants.gov, you have to register with the site. This requires navigating a sea of acronyms for treasure buried at several urls, beginning with obtaining your DUNS number,/a>, registering with the CCR, and then registering with with the ORC (yes, Dungeons and Dragons fans, you register with the orc. I am so not kidding). After that the “The E-Business Point of Contact (POC) at your organization must respond to the registration email from Grants.gov and login at Grants.gov to authorize you as an AOR.”. What an AOR is is never explained. I assume it’s not the radio format. We never identified our POC.
As it turned out, we had been registered with CCR as part of the process from the Uncompassionate Capitalist Fund, but no one knew our password or username anymore, including my former supervisor who had done the deed. Unfortunately the CCR’s helpline is a recorded message and doesn’t offer access to a live operator. That led to two days of phone calls and forth between two different agencies to finally get whatever the hell is was that allowed us to register with the orc and become an AOR. In any event, we got our username and password, which I made sure to save on my hard drive.
Getting letters of support and memorandums of understanding from collaborating agencies and the city wasn’t one of my responsibilities, they came in within a day of their request anyway, no delay.
[By the way, and this has nothing to do with anything, but I am listening to Alejandro Escovedo for the first time right now thanks to a site called pandora. Both Alejandro and Pandora are amazing, please visit both. I cannot believe I missed out on this guy for so long. I'm listening to a song called "By the Hand of the Father". It is awesome. But I digress.]
While all the back and forth with the various websites went on, I was busy writing the narrative, which was easy enough. There was a lot of back and forth with the department directors, edits and changes, but we finally got something we were all comfortable with and which our Executive Director also liked. Now it was time to write the budget. Everything, literally everything had to be listed. This included a mandatory $15,000 for our staffers’ travel to participate in trainings by the federal government: that’s right, as a prerequisite to be considered for a grant, we had to agree to spend $15,000 of that money on trainings provided by the feds held in DC.
Worse, the requirements were scattered through the application which was 19 pages thick. The budget was edited at least four times. Then there was the budget narrative, which is basically regurgitating the spreadsheet in paragraph form for those people that are apparently so weak at math, they must not be able to recognize numerals.
Finally we had all of our materials together, and we were ready to submit. I started up the PureEdge Viewer, a piece of software I will probably never use again, which the feds require to submit online. It was riddled with errors: in many fields marked as “required” or “mandatory”, the program wouldn’t let you input text. Various embedded standard forms we were supposed to sign off on didn’t work as they were supposed to. BUt at least uploading our documents worked.
Unfortunately when it came time to send the completed application into the Internets, the PureEdge Viewer didn’t want to talk with the Firefox browser I use. This meant I had to set up the neanderthal Internet Explorer as my default browser, and start the uploading process from scratch and try for a second time to input information into the various embedded standard forms. SUCCESS! The PureEdge Viewer connected to the Internets. Now, it was time to send our application: perversely, Grants.gov doesn’t require you to login with that hard-won password from the AOR ORC at CCR until the very last step of a long and complicated process. I had been very careful to save the username and password to a Word file, and to make sure there were no typos, I copied and pasted both into their respective windows. Hit “enter”.
Denied. Fuck. Tried it again.
Denied. Typed them manually: denied. Both were case sensitive, I tried reversing cases. Denied. It didn’t matter what I did, we were denied.
Thankfully, the application process also required you to submit a hard copy, and what’s more it was the hard copy that would be reviewed. I placed a call to the feds’ contact person for the grant and left a message explaining what had happened. Our application included not only the hard copy of the grant, but printouts from the PureEdge viewer itself: I make a point of filing everything related to a given grant no matter how minor. In cases like this, it helps to have a paper trail.
The grant went out tonight, postmarked on time, with all of the necessary supporting documents. I doubt we’ll get the money: in fact, all I expect is another sneering letter from the feds, pointing out all our shortcomings.
Well fuck them, I say. Fuck them and the fucking horses those fucking fuck-fucks rode in on. Tomorrow morning, I am finally, finally, getting back to three grants to three private foundations. They may or may not give us money, but they don’t give a fuck if the font is 10 point or 12 point, they won’t make me download software and fill out redundant forms, and make me figuratively honk figurative horns with my nose like a trained seal. I have high hopes for one of them, and I see a 50/50 shot with the other two. I can get back to a super-important, practically completed application to another foundation where we have allies: it’s a relatively small amount of money, but would fund the translation all of our domestic violence materials, from administrative forms like intake and referrals, to educational forms, to pamphlets and outreach materials.
It’s striking really: normally when I send out a proposal, I feel really good, as if I’ve accomplished something. That’s especially true when it’s for a large sum of money: I’m not shy about asking for as much as possible. The way I see it, if your used car is worth $1000, ask for $2500: you’re more likely to settle for $1200, instead of $750. And I’ve got a good rate of return too.
But after getting done with the Feds I just feel tired and dirty. If we get the money, I’ll be on cloud nine, but that application was brutal.
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