Team Up at the Starting Line: Search for Grant Opportunities and Complete Applications

These skills will help you and your colleagues to support the creative pursuit of grant funds as well as to assist patrons who want to learn more about grant seeking activities. Next, it is essential to gain practice in interpreting grant guidelines to create fundable grant proposals.

This workshop offers practical steps for doing both: searching and learning what to do with the information you find. These two activities performed in a team-based environment will support the collaborative spirit in libraries for getting the job done together. Case studies from the past 16 years of developing awarded grant proposals will show you the hidden art and science of how to do this, and outline the steps necessary to create complete and competitive proposals.

Outcomes:

• Knowledge of using databases for discovering appropriate grant opportunities
• Greater understanding of how to read sponsor guidelines and create in-house checklists
• Visualizations of awarded projects that benefitted from best practices in preparing proposals

Presenter

Bess de Farber has provided grantseeking instruction and collaboration workshops to thousands of library staff, nonprofit and academic professionals, artists, and university students in the past 32 years, and has led efforts to secure millions in grant funding for nonprofits and academic libraries. She is the author of two books on grantseeking, Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A Practical Guide for Librarians, and Creating Fundable Grant Proposals: Profiles of Innovative Partnerships, and co-author of a third, Collaborating with Strangers: Facilitating Workshops in Libraries, Classes, and Nonprofits. She holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Southern California, and a Master of Nonprofit Management from Florida Atlantic University.