Acknowledgments

A book about funding the work of others owes its own debts, and they are many.

The Practitioners and Teachers

This book stands on the shoulders of the grant writing educators who refused to keep the craft a secret. Ellen Karsh and Arlen Sue Fox, whose The Only Grant-Writing Book You'll Ever Need made the nonprofit proposal approachable for a generation of overworked development staff. Stephen Russell and David Morrison, whose Grant Application Writer's Workbook dissected the NIH proposal with a precision that taught countless investigators to think like reviewers. Tori O'Neal-McElrath, whose Winning Grants Step by Step gave small organizations a path through the foundation process. Andy Robinson, Cheryl Carter New and James Aaron Quick, and the many workshop leaders whose handouts have circulated, photocopied and beloved, through nonprofit offices and university research-development units for decades. We have tried to gather what they taught separately into a single place.

The Funders Who Teach in the Open

An enormous amount of what a grant writer needs to know is published by the funders themselves, and the people who write that guidance deserve credit. The program officers at NIH, NSF, and the federal agencies who answer the phone, hold pre-application webinars, and publish detailed instructions are the most underused resource in the field. The staff of community and private foundations who write candid guidelines and take exploratory calls make the relationship-driven world of philanthropy navigable. The reference librarians and the staff behind Candid (formerly the Foundation Center and GuideStar), Grants.gov, NIH RePORTER, and the NSF Award Search built the public infrastructure that makes funder research possible at all.

The Research on How Funding Really Works

Our treatment of reviewer behavior and the realities of the funding system is informed by a growing body of research on peer review and grant allocation: studies of inter-reviewer reliability in study sections, analyses of how success rates and resubmission affect careers, and the open work of organizations studying equity in funding. Where this book makes empirical claims about how review works, we have tried to ground them in that literature or to attribute them honestly as the accumulated experience of practitioners.

The Reviewers' Perspective

Every grant writer becomes a better writer the first time they serve on a review panel. We are grateful to the institutions and funders who invite working professionals and researchers onto their panels, and to the colleagues who have described — candidly, and sometimes ruefully — what it is actually like to read forty proposals in a weekend. Much of the most useful advice in this book comes from that vantage point: not "here is what to write," but "here is what it feels like to read what you wrote."

The Open-Source and Open-Education Movement

This book is free because a community of people believe educational materials should be. It is built with mdBook, the open-source publishing tool, and released under a Creative Commons license in the spirit of the open textbook movement. We are grateful to the DataField.Dev project and the broader open-education community for the conviction that the knowledge required to fund good work should not itself sit behind a paywall.

The Reader

Finally, we acknowledge you — the researcher, the nonprofit professional, the teacher, the artist, the organizer, the founder, the administrator — who picked up a free book to learn a hard skill so you can fund work that matters. The willingness to face the blank page, to absorb a rejection and try again, and to ask for what your mission needs is what gives this book its purpose. Every chapter was written with you, and a real deadline, in mind.

A note on the examples. The grant proposals, budgets, organizations, dollar figures, and reviewer comments used as worked examples throughout this book are either drawn from cited public sources or are composite constructions created for teaching. Composite examples do not depict any real person, organization, or funded project. Funder names, mechanisms, and review criteria are described from public guidance that changes over time; always verify current requirements with the funder before you submit.