Matching Your Needs to Available Grants

Last time I discussed defining your school’s problem before you apply for grants. Once you define the problem or problems you have, it’s then time to try matching your needs with the different grants that are available to help solve your particular set of problems. Depending on the type of need you have, there might be no grants available or 500 possible grants available that you need to sift through.

I can tell you that if you’re looking for $500,000 to build a new field house for your football team, you don’t need to search for grants. There is no grant money out there for that type of problem. If you’re a school looking to improve your reading program, there might be 500 grant possibilities. Everything else falls somewhere in between.

How do you find the grants that are both available and pertinent to your problem? That’s an easy one to answer. Without a doubt, the best way to find grants that match your needs is to use a grant database. A good grant database has a huge amount of grant information all in one place. It’s constantly updated with new grants put in daily and ones with past deadlines removed daily.

With a grant database, you put in your search criteria and out pops a list of possible grants. Not all of these grants will match your needs, but you have all the possible grants in one place and that makes them very easy to sort through. Your alternative is to do a hundred Google searches. That will usually get you information on grants that are not current about 80% of the time. Very frustrating. Your other alternative is to use a grant newsletter, either printed or on line. But newsletters can only list a few grants at a time, and they are outdated within a few weeks.

Once again, the best way to look for grants is with a grant database. Subscribing to a grant database can be fairly expensive, however, with subscriptions running several hundred dollars per year. You are fortunate because you have a free one to use. Discount School Supply offers its customers a free grant database. Just go to: My School Grant ^sm

Register by putting in your email address and start searching. It can’t be any easier than that.

Next time, I’ll discuss how to use this free grant database most effectively. Don’t miss it!

CHECK THIS OUT!

Grant Name: Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year
Funded by: Toyota & National Center for Family Literacy

Description: The Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year Award recognizes individual contributions to improving literacy for children and adults. The winner and several finalists are selected annually by the National Center for Family Literacy to honor educators who demonstrate and impact on families through early childhood education, school-based programs, adult literacy and ESL programs, parenting education, library literacy programs and community literacy programs.
Program Areas: Adult Literacy, Reading.
Recipients: Public School, Private/Charter School, Faith-based, Other.
Proposal Deadline: 12/5/2008
Average Amount: $500 to $7,500.00
Email: ToyotaTeacher@famlit.org
Website: National Center For Family Literacy
Availability: All States.