Exercises — Chapter 31: Grant Writing for Community Development

Work these with a real or imagined community and place-based project in mind. The aim is to write with the community rather than about it, ground the work in resident-led and asset-based analysis, and build both places and power.

How to use these: Part A checks recall; Part B applies the chapter to concrete community-development decisions; Part C asks you to create at a real practitioner's level (a resident-engagement plan, a coalition design); Part M interleaves earlier chapters. Answers to selected exercises (★) are in the back matter.

Part A — Recall and Understand

A1. ★ State the chapter's threshold concept in your own words. What is the difference between writing with a community and about it?

A2. Sketch the community-development funding ecosystem, naming the key place-based public funders.

A3. What makes a community needs assessment resident-led and asset-based, and why do both matter?

A4. ★ Why are community-development proposals usually coalition proposals, and what does the threshold concept add to the coalition craft?

A5. Define: CDBG, place-based, resident engagement, coalition/MOU, environmental justice, asset-based community development, community power.

A6. Why is the sustainability challenge distinctive where there's no tax base, and what are the realistic answers?

A7. What does it mean to build both "places and power," and why are the two connected?

Part B — Apply

B1. ★ With or about? For each, decide whether it's written with or about the community, and how to fix the "about" ones: - (a) An outside institution commissions a study and designs a neighborhood plan, consulting a few residents. - (b) A resident-led coalition conducts its own needs assessment and authors a proposal in the community's voice. - (c) A large nonprofit leads a coalition holding all the budget and decisions, with a community group doing outreach. - (d) A community organization leads the coalition with residents on the governing body and budget flowing to community groups.

B2. Asset-based vs. deficit-based. Rewrite a deficit-only needs description ("this neighborhood suffers from poverty, crime, and vacancy") into an asset-based one that names strengths alongside challenges.

B3. ★ Build the coalition. For a community-development effort, design a coalition genuinely led by community-rooted organizations and residents, with larger institutions in genuine partnership. Who leads, decides, holds the money?

B4. Sustainability without a tax base. A disinvested neighborhood's revitalization can't become financially self-sufficient locally. Lay out a realistic, honest sustainability case.

B5. Places and power. For a housing-development project, articulate both the tangible places-outcomes and the community-power outcomes, and how they connect.

Part C — Analyze and Create

C1. ★ Draft a resident-engagement plan. Using the Section 31.3 checkpoint, draft one: how residents lead the needs assessment, the asset-based lens, resident roles and power in the work, and how the community authors the proposal. This goes in your "My Proposal" document.

C2. Conduct an asset map. For a community (real or imagined), sketch an asset map — the residents, organizations, institutions, cultural strengths, and relationships the development could build on — alongside the real (often externally-imposed) challenges.

C3. ★ Author with the community. Describe concretely how you, as a grant writer, would help a community author a proposal rather than writing it for them — the processes, the roles, the power-sharing.

C4. Power-building plan. Design how a community-development project would build the community's lasting capacity and power (leaders developed, organizations strengthened, residents organized), not just deliver a physical outcome.

C5. Engage the local CDBG process. Using the Section 31.1 "Going Deeper," describe how a community organization would engage its local government's CDBG planning process to access funding.

Part M — Mixed and Interleaved Review

M1. ★ (Ch 21 + 31) How is "with, not about" the domestic expression of the localization/local-leadership threshold?

M2. (Ch 25 + 31) How does asset-based community development connect to asset-based, agency-centered framing and the rejection of the savior narrative?

M3. ★ (Ch 23 + 31) How does the coalition craft apply to community development, and what does community leadership of the coalition add?

M4. (Ch 14 + 31) How does the sustainability principle apply where there's no tax base, and why is building capacity and power the realistic answer?

M5. (Ch 8 + 31) How does the needs-as-argument craft become a resident-led, asset-based community needs assessment?

M6. (Ch 19 + 31) How does CDBG connect to the formula-funds, pass-through, and local-administration structure of Chapter 19?

🪞 Metacognitive check-in. If you work "in" communities from an outside organization, did this chapter surface any habit of seeing the community as the subject of your work rather than its author? The "with, not about" principle asks you to genuinely cede authorship and power to the community — uncomfortable for organizations used to driving the work, but exactly what makes community development last. Where, honestly, does your work sit on the "to" versus "with" spectrum, and what would it take to move it?