As of last week, my wonderful boss Tammy has had me working on a surprisingly fascinating project. I’ve been asked to comb through almost a hundred of our old grant proposals, breaking each one down into a spreadsheet with categories like what project was proposed and how much funding we asked for. The interesting thing is that all of the grants I’m looking at are ones that ECDI did not receive. Tammy hopes that by analyzing the commonalities between these grants, ECDI will get a better idea of which grant proposals are most successful, which we could improve upon and which ones we maybe shouldn’t apply for in the future. While it feels kind of wrong looking though the past failures of an organization I only recently started working for, I’ve also learned an important lesson:

Some days you just don’t win the grant game, no matter how hard you try.  Although a few of the denied proposals were obviously thrown together haphazardly at the last possible minute, the vast majority of the ones I’ve read so far are thoughtful and well done. Someone really poured their heart and soul into these proposals, but for whatever reason they didn’t make the cut. Often, it seems like regardless of how closely the proposal matches the request instructions and prompts, there may be something else that the grant givers are looking for that ECDI can’t provide. For me, this realization is both terrifying and comforting. I’m the type of person who enjoys having a good deal of control over the outcomes of any given situation, and the idea that I could follow a prompt perfectly and still have a slim shot of getting a grant is a bit unnerving. On the other hand, it’s kind of nice knowing that not everything is in my control, especially since I’m still very new to this line of work. As I move forward, hopefully succeeding with some grants but almost definitely losing some others, I think I’ll choose to be honored by the fact that so many ECDI grant writers with years more experience than me have regularly encounter the same setbacks and lived to write another day.