Red Squirrel

Surviving the Grant Wilderness: What Can you Learn from Squirrels?

This week, I wanted to share some thoughts on surviving in the world of grants. In many ways, grant seeking is like navigating a wilderness; it is full of resources and pitfalls, predators and allies. To find success and win a grant, you should take a lesson from squirrels.

Which Grants Should You Seek?

Squirrels learn what foods to eat, how to find the best food, and how to store it in a sturdy home. This is not just instinct, it is survival.

Equally, it is important to seek low-hanging fruit by making the right match between you and the donor. Strategically, you can best prepare for complex grants by first attaining simpler grants. Through this effort, you gather the credibility necessary to develop a sturdy home known for its success and excellence. Your best bet is to begin by examining what a donor wants in their grant applicants. The key is making the match to what you want as well.

How to Compete in a Diverse World

Squirrels learn by observation; not just other squirrels, but other species, as well. Theyknow their limitations and strengths – they don’t often miss when they jump from branch to branch – and thrive in a highly diverse world with loud, domineering, and sometimes dangerous species.

Once you make the match with the right donor, you will need to assess the competition. Are the other applicants similar to you or are they another species? To find out, you need to know who has applied in the past and who was awarded the grants and why. This information leads you to which competition strategy to use. Grant success depends on knowledge, observation, and creativity. To comprehend the diversity of grants, and therefore competition, look for federal and foundation search engines. Check out the Grant Training Center’s Member Community for the Federal Grant Finder and Foundation Finder or find similar information at GuideStar and grants.gov.

What’s Your Capacity?

Recently, the BBC ran a very interesting special entitled “Daylight Robbery,” which followed squirrels mastering increasingly complicated obstacles to reaching food. How many of you have watched as they outsmart bird feeders or planting barriers designed to deter them?

Now that you know the competition, you have to figure out how to beat the increasingly complicated obstacles to the grant. These are the paradigm shifts that result in finding the smart ideas that fill the gaps and translate into innovations. These innovations then make us the architects of new discoveries and approaches. Some organizations and agencies are more interested than others in this concept. The NSF, for example, funds innovative ideas with a passion.

Why Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration?

Squirrels are not only nimble and crafty, but are also adept in forming multigenerational communities. Smarter squirrels live longer, and those that take advantage of social connections, even more so.

In the wilderness of grant writing, one of the key areas for success is interdisciplinarity and collaboration. Due to the complexity of disciplines, donors encourage collaborative grants to ensure all the gaps are covered and to achieve a broad impact. Working individually and without the input of your senior colleagues can easily lead us to limited perspectives, and – at times – prove fatal. One excellent method to demonstrate proficiency in working with a multigenerational community is to seek a co-PI with more experience than yourself or work with successful grant applicants.

Persevering, Then Persevering Again

Squirrels engage in play behavior when they are young, which decreases in middle age, and then disappears as they grow older. Play behavior is not just fun, it also teaches the young squirrels what they need to know to survive into old age.

As young investigators or new applicants, it is quite appropriate to engage in a grant that may not succeed. After all, it is your first try, and will often lead to a more substantive second submission. Using these stages to success – trying unsuccessfully for the grant, obtaining reviewers’ comments, applying the suggestions to your second submission – builds experience. Your experience leads to much more focused and well-constructed attempts, which ultimately lead to success.

Mathilda Harris

Over the past 18 years, she has written grants, conducted capital campaigns, developed strategic plans for grant procurement, and assisted individuals and institutions to write winning proposals for various donors.

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