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Those in the YALSA community would probably have no trouble agreeing with the statement that teen services in libraries could benefit from broader support from the library community and beyond.  In an effort to help advance library services for and with teens, YALSA and its Future of Teens & Libraries Taskforce have submitted a grant proposal via a competitive challenge organized by the Knight Foundation.  If funded, the project would help libraries improve their overall teen program by providing them with free tools and resources to incorporate connected learning into their existing services.  In order for this to have a chance at getting funded, the proposal needs to get a significant number of ‘applauds’ and comments from visitors to the site.  We encourage you to ‘applaud’ the proposal and/or leave a comment, but also to take a moment to share this link out with your library networks, advocates and colleagues and ask them to leave a comment or give us some applause as well.  The post is open to comments and applause until Oct. 21^st, so timing is limited!  Thank you for all that you do to help teens succeed in school and prepare for college and careers.  The great work that you do makes a difference in so many lives, and together we can have an even bigger impact!

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As I mentioned yesterday, Target offers grant money to schools and organizations who need help with an early reading program. An early reading program might entail hiring a children’s book author/illustrator to present to students (he said rather shamelessly).

Dollar General also has a grant program for early literacy/youth development—as does Barbara Bush, Verizon, Scripps-Howard, and Clorox.

Here is a round-up of foundations who offer grant money for summer reading programs. Here are awards & grants available from the International Reading Association.

If you would like a detailed description of my presentations to help you apply for these grants, be sure to give me a yell!

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“Applications are now being accepted for the Annual Virginia Hamilton and Arnold Adoff Creative Outreach Grants for Teachers and Librarians. Two grants up to $1,000 each will be given. One grant will be given to a teacher and another to a librarian for proposals to develop new classroom or library programs that raise awareness of multicultural literature among young people; particularly but not exclusively through the works of Virginia Hamilton. The application deadline is Feb. 28 for that year’s award. Complete instructions and proposal guidelines are available on the Grant Application.”

http://www.kent.edu/virginiahamiltonconference/awards/upload/grant_application-new.pdf

Filed under: Diversity Issues, Grants, Opportunities Tagged: grant, Virginia Hamilton Conference

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I'm thrilled to have with me today writer and VCFA MFA Candidate Skila Brown. Skila was the 2011 winner of the SCBWI WIP Grant. Google Skila and you'll see that she has plenty of freelance credits for articles on parenting and adoption. I know her as a writer of snappy picture books, a talented poet and an amazingly loving, intelligent and hardworking person.

What can you do with an SCBWI WIP Grant?

• Purchase of necessary materials
• Travel for research
• Conferences, courses and/or workshops in advanced writing techniques
• Child care
• Rental of work space
• Supplemental basic support
• Other items deemed necessary to complete the project.

If you are like me, you've researched grants and found them just as the deadline approaches. For the SCBWI 2012 WIP Grants- completed application and accompanying materials must be postmarked no earlier than February 15th and must be RECEIVED BY March 15th. The Grants are available to both full and associate members of the SCBWI. They are not available for projects on which there are already contracts.

With what project will the WIP grant help you?
My middle grade novel, Caminar. It is the story of a boy who, after surviving the massacre of his village, journeys up the side of a mountain, and must decide what being a man during a time of war really means. Caminar is a coming-of-age novel told in verse and set in Guatemala during the year 1981.


For what types of expenses will the grant money be used?
I will travel to Guatemala this winter to revise the story while I'm there, enhance the setting, and hopefully find survivors who are willing to read and vet my manuscript.


What do you think keeps people from applying for grants/awards?
A grant application sounds so intimidating, doesn't it? I mean, there are people who write them professionally for a living! There's also that kind of hopeless feeling of "there are so many people applying...I will never get picked...why bother..." I also think some people wait until the last minute, look at what is required in the application packet, and then realize they don't have the time or energy to spend on it.


You are a mom and a student at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In what ways did this make the application process more challenging? Did your studies or family help the process at all?
Honestly, being very busy and juggling many things forces me to think and plan ahead. I am not a procrastinator. In this regard, it really made the application process easier for me. I read the application instructions months in advance and allowed myself plenty of time to get it right.

This was not my first time applying for an SCBWI grant. I applied once before for a different grant, with a different manuscript. That story wasn't as solid or unique, but also - I waited until right before the deadline, rushed through the application, and didn't put as much thought into it as I could have. All mistakes I knew not to repeat.


When you dropped the materials into the mailbox, did you feel confident? Why or why not?
I felt confident that I had done the best job I could do on the application packet, but certainly had no expectation that I would win! A teeny hopeful part of me was longing for a runner-up position. When I got the call from SCBWI this summer and was told I was the winner, I absolutely could not believe it.


Are there any tips or hints that you would give to other SCBWI members who are interested in completing the application materials?
Start early. Allow yourself plenty of time to review the materials. Cr

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ARTSPIRE – FISCAL SPONSORSHIP

http://www.artspire.org/artists.aspx

Want to spend more time creating and less time dealing with fund raising? Apply now for Artspire’s Fiscal Sponsorship program. Gain access to funding opportunities from foundations or corporate funders that are usually restricted to 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations. You will gain the ability to offer individual donors the tax-deductibility incentives of making a charitable donation.  Receive access to NYFA’s wide range of services and resources, such as our educational workshops that are only offered to fiscally sponsored projects and organizations.  Unlimited phone calls, emails, and review of grant proposals.  Gain profile on Artspire.org and visual connection with Artspire and NYFA. Gain the ability to collect online donations.

Application is free.

Artspire fiscal sponsorship is open to artists with a US social security number – no matter where they live. Artists can also live in the US but work overseas.

Deadlines to apply: June 30, September 30, December 31, and March 31, 2011. Application includes: Project description, budget, resume and work samples (if applicable).

Filed under: Grant money, need to know, opportunity, organizations Tagged: Artists, Artspire Organization, Fiscal Sponsorship, Grant

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You Must Apply!

I always apply for grants for writers; I’ve never won a grant (though I was given a different type of award), but just going through the process is valuable. Think of it as a work-out for your submission-muscles; where would Arnold be today if he hadn’t worked out?

Audience. The process of filling out a grant application and sending it in forces a writer to think about audience. Who are you writing for, what genre? Does your work really fit that audience or are you fudging a bit?

Bravery. It takes guts to write and even more courage to send out your work over and over. The process of sending in a grant application is relatively easy, though, because you’re not competing for publication, just money that will help you write a while longer. It takes less courage to send in grant applications than to submit to a publisher. Do it.

Experimenting with new genres. The Arkansas Arts Council rotates the genre for which they give grants: novels and short stories, poetry, literary nonfiction. Guess what? I’ve submitted each time. I’ve looked ahead to see what they are looking for and worked ahead in that genre. For the poetry submission, probably one of my weaker submissions, I wrote a number of poems on a theme. While I didn’t win the grant, it gave me experience with writing a variety of poetry forms over an extended period of time. Any experience with poetry is bound to make me a better writer, right?

Discipline. Finally, the act of submitting a grant application requires discipline, something writers need more of. You must plan ahead, read and fit your work into the grant’s requirements. You must print out a mss and address an envelope. The discipline to submit is crucial to your success as a writer. Rejection doesn’t matter, as long as you can keep on submitting. Don’t JUST submit to grants programs; but don’t neglect them, either.

I’m mailing in my grant application today to the Arkansas Arts Council. Look for councils in your area and for national grants. The Poets and Writers magazine maintains one list of grants and contests.

Revise with confidence.

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Philip A. Schwartzkroin has been a research scientist for over 35 years. Through his many years in the laboratory, he has trained and mentored numerous postdoctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students many of whom have gone on to establish successful leadership roles in their chosen areas of research. Dr. Schwartzkroin currently is Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California-Davis, an affiliate of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, and holds the Bronte Endowed Chair in Epilepsy Research in the UC Davis School of Medicine. His book, So You want To Be A Scientist?, provides a glimpse into the job of being a research scientist, addressing explicitly many issues that are rarely addressed directly in training programs. In the original post below we learn how to react to the rejection of a research grant application.

Are you interested in a career as a research scientist? Do you have any idea what is involved in such a career? Graduate training programs do a good job in preparing students with facts and in teaching technical laboratory skills. But there is a lot more to the job of being a researcher than simply doing experiments. And many of the needed skills are not explicitly taught.

For example: How do you get grants to support your research?

Let’s say you’ve submitted a grant application and the reviewers don’t like it – and so recommend that the granting agency not provide funding. You try again, addressing the concerns and critiques of the reviewers – but the review scores for this second application are only marginally better than in the first round. What do you do then? This conundrum is not uncommon, and the appropriate response requires perseverance, confidence, and guidance. Here are some suggestions (certainly not exhaustive) about how one might proceed:

1) Do additional experiments that provide more compelling preliminary data.

2) Ask a senior mentor to help you “read between the lines.” While you may have, in your revised application, addressed the explicit criticisms expressed in the first review, you may have missed an important implicit message. For example, reviewers often try to let you know that they simply don’t find your questions or topic very interesting - without actually saying that. It would be important to know if that were the case.

3) Get input – hopefully honest and objective - from your colleagues who do not work directly in the area of the grant application. One of the difficult tricks in getting grant support is convincing the reviewers - who are likely not to be working in your area of interest - that your ideas are important and that your experimental approach will yield significant new insights. Sometimes it’s hard for a researcher to gain sufficient distance from his/her own work to get a good sense of whether the grant application succeeds on this level.

4) Request that your application be reviewed (in the next round) by a different review panel. This alternative might be effective if you suspect there is a member of the initial review group who is “sabotaging” your application, or if you think that the group simply doesn’t have the expertise/interests to review your application appropriately.

5) Try sending the application to another granting agency that has a more direct interest in your area of study. For example, a private foundation with a particular area of concern may be more sympathetic to work on “their” topic than a large government agency that deals with applications that cover a broad range of topics.

6) Alter the focus of your proposal if you think that will provide a more effective “hook.” Such an alteration does not necessarily mean changing your proposed experiments. Rather, it may involve a change in emphasis, using different key words, reorienting the background and rationale sections of the application.

7) Forget about the experiments proposed in your application, and develop another set of studies that you think are more likely to be funded. It is important to learn when to “cut bait” and go on to something more productive. This decision is very difficult. Indeed, we scientists usually resist pressures to change our research directions. But this alternative is always important to consider.

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Thanks to the support of U.S. Senator Susan Collins (Maine) and U.S. Senator Robert Byrd (West Virginia), First Book received grants from the U.S. Department of Education, Fund for the Improvement of Education to provide new books to children in need throughout the states of Maine and West Virginia.

As a generous part of the grants, First Book is pleased to offer the following opportunities to all eligible Recipient Groups in Maine and West Virginia:

• Through September 30, 2009, all groups in Maine and West Virginia that complete a purchase from the First Book Marketplace will receive a matching Marketplace store credit to be used towards a subsequent purchase. Up to $500 in a matching store credit will be issued at the end of the promotion period and must be spent by November 20, 2009.
• While grant funds are available, all Recipient Groups in Maine and West Virginia that opt to have books shipped to them from a First Book National Book Bank distribution will not be charged the normal $0.35 per book shipping fee as the shipping cost will be paid for by the Department of Education Grant.

For more information about the grants and for updates on incentive opportunities, please see www.firstbook.org/maine and www.firstbook.org/doewestvirginia.

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I found this little blurb in the local newspaper to be interesting.

Basically, the CNMI Historic Preservation office announces the winner of a grant that applies to the CNMI.

The grant: the 2009 American Battlefield Protection Program grant is one of 33 grants awarded by the National Park Service to help preserve important American battle sites. The grant amounts range from about $21,000 to $78,000. The CNMI grant is for $49,967.


Photo by Jane Resture

The awardee: the grant goes to the Ships of Discovery and Exploration. From its website, it seems to have a diverse group of experts in science, archeology, marine exploration, and more. They've been involved in underwater archeology since 1989, and played a role in establishing the "Turks and Caicos National Museum" in the Caribbean. They seem to have the means and ability to do the job.

The job: As described in the announcement on the ABPP site:

The Battle of Saipan, which was fought between American and Japanese forces in the Mariana Islands during World War II, was one of the most politically and militarily significant battles of the war - American capture of Saipan brought land-based, long range B-29 bombers within range of striking Japan. Through archeological survey and GIS mapping of Invasion Beach at Tanapag Lagoon, this project will identify and document submerged remains of the Battle of Saipan for use in the future development of an underwater maritime heritage trail.

So it appears the Historic Preservation is hoping to develop an underwater maritime heritage trail--another great idea with cultural and tourism potential.

And all this means someone (namely HPO) is doing something right. Good.

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