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by Phyllis Holman Weisbard
This article is a reprint from the Winter 1992 issue of FEMINIST COLLECTIONS (v.13, no.2). Like most titles in the series “Wisconsin Bibliographies in Women’s Studies,” this item is free of charge. For more information, contact: UW System Women’s Studies Librarian, 430 Memorial Library, 728 State St., Madison, WI 53706.
In the old days it used to be called “grantsmanship” — that wily art of locating sources of money and actually getting funded. No single gender-neutral term replaces it; the best, perhaps, is the phrase “grant-getting skills.”1 But whatever we call it, the finding and securing of funding is increasingly crucial to the success of individual women and to agencies and causes of interest to women.
Grant-getting ability, like any other set of skills, can in some measure be acquired. Through diligent study every would-be grant-getter can and should become familiar with the resource tools and introductions to the grants world now available in profusion. But before embarking on that exploration, there are some daunting figures to keep in mind. Besides the ever-increasing demand on a finite supply of funding for all proposals, there are special problems associated with getting money for women’s projects. Drawing on 1990 Foundation Center data, the National Council for Research on Women points out that less than 6 percent of all foundation funds — $165.8 million out of $3.25 billion spent – was designated for women’s programs.2 According to NCRW sources, in recent years “having women or girls in the name of an organization or the focus of an organization’s proposal is the ‘kiss of death’ for successful fund- raising.”3 NCRW attributes this sorry state not to the “success of the women’s movement,” as some grant-givers have retorted, but to the unwillingness of grantors to recognize continued gender-based discrimination and gender-based needs.
There is still a gender gap with respect to financial aid awarded to students, too. The American Association of University Women’s preliminary analysis of student aid awarded in 1989-90 found that women received less federal and institutional support than did men.4 The widest gap was that between Black women and men awarded federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants. In 1990, the average amount provided Black men was eighty percent higher than the average amount given to Black women.
Perhaps some of the problem with respect to foundation grant-giving lies in the low number of women grant-givers. As the Women and Foundations/Corporate Philanthropy network tells it in a series of “Far From Done” Reports, women are still woefully underrepresented both as grantees and within the leadership structure of the grant- makers.5 The latest in the series, “Getting It Done: From Commitment to Action on Funding For Women and Girls,”6 signals that there are two struggles for grant-seekers to wage simultaneously: the individual, painstaking learning and researching of the grants world, and the collective resolve to place more women’s issues on the tables of the corporate and foundation board rooms by having more women occupy the chairs around those tables. At the same time, the AAUW and other groups need to continue monitoring and publicizing breeches of gender equity in the awarding of governmental and institutional aid. While not losing sight of the collective activity, the rest of this article will address the tasks of the individual grant- seeker, by providing a guide to some of the fundamental tools of the grants trade.
Since most funding is targeted either at institutions or at individuals, but not both, the resource tools generally follow suit. A good place to start, especially if you are searching on behalf of an institution or project, and whether or not you think you will ultimately be a suitable candidate for private foundation funding, is with the publications and resources of The Foundation Center. This is a national organization supported by foundations to provide authoritative information on foundation giving. The Center maintains large reference collections in New York, San Francisco, Washington, and Cleveland. A network of cooperating institutions throughout the country, including UW-Madison’s Memorial Library and Marquette University’s Memorial Library, house smaller collections of Foundation grant-seeking information. The Center’s principal publications include The Foundation Directory (current edition is the 13th, 1991), covering foundations with assets over $1 million or with annual grants of $100,000 or more; a new companion volume, The Foundation Directory, Part Two, for grants from $25,000 to $100,000 (1st edition, 1991-2); the Grants Index, an annual (with quarterly updates) listing grants of $5,000 or more made to nonprofit organizations; and the National Directory of Corporate Giving (2nd edition, 1991), which lists over 1,500 companies making contributions to nonprofit organizations.
Rather than start with these publications directly, a novice might consult two other Foundation Center publications that serve as introductions to grant-seeking, both of which treat corporate and governmental as well as private foundation funding. Foundation Fundamentals: A Guide for Grantseekers (4th edition edited by Judith B. Margolin, 1991) defines foundations, helps readers develop search strategies for locating potential grantors, and provides detailed descriptive examples of how to effectively use the main publications of the Foundation Center and other groups. Chapters are also devoted to corporate grant-giving and to effective program planning and proposal-writing. Foundation Fundamentals includes an extensive annotated bibliography of additional readings. Of particular note is the section on proposal development.
As its title aptly suggests, an even more painless introduction is provided by the Center’s User-Friendly Guide: Grantseeker’s Guide to Resources (edited by Judith B. Margolin, 1990). According to its preface, the User-Friendly Guide is organized around ten questions most frequently asked of the Center’s public service staff and “should respond to 99% of your initial concerns.” (Among the questions: “How Do I Find Out About Grants for My Subject Area or Field of Interest?”) Appendices offer sources of information on corporate and governmental funding, a list of periodicals of interest to grant-seekers, helpful hints on using Foundation Center reference books, and a glossary of terms (for example: “Form 990-PF – The public record information return that all independent foundations are required by law to submit yearly to the Internal Revenue Service; also referred to as a foundation tax return””).
If you are interested in foundations and corporations that have supported programs aimed specifically at women and girls, you can bypass the general guides and go directly to The Foundation Center’s National Guide to Funding for Women and Girls (hereafter Guide for Women and Girls), which includes a great deal of introductory explanatory material. Edited by Stan Olson, Ruth Kovacs, and Suzanne Haile, The Guide for Women and Girls is compiled from The Foundation Directory, the Grants Index, and the National Directory of Corporate Giving. The 641 grant-making foundations and 74 direct corporate-giving programs included “have shown a substantial interest in programs for women either as part of their stated purpose or through the actual grants of $5,000 or more reported to the Foundation Center in the latest year of record.” Although based on the same database and time period as the information used by the NCRW, which had found $165 million given to projects for women and girls, the Guide located 2,806 grants representing over $190 million in support of a variety of programs for women and girls, including family planning and reproductive rights, girls’ clubs, female educational institutions, and welfare services for disadvantaged women” (p.v.). The Guide urges users to thoroughly research foundations of interest.7 and to investigate additional sources of local giving, especially for small grants with purely local impact. Arranged geographically, the Guide For Women and Girls contains indexes of donors, officers, and trustees; types of support (ex.: lectureships, publications, capital campaigns); subject; program name; and a more detailed, cross-referenced geographic index. (Remember, these are grants to institutions, not directly to individuals.)
The grants listed in the 1991 Guide For Women and Girls were generally awarded for 1988 or 1989. For example, in looking for foundations that provide institutional fellowship assistance to Midwest women, one of the foundations you would find is the Monticello College Foundation of Godfrey, Illinois, which supports programs that assist advanced education for women. In 1988 the Foundation gave $10,000 to the Newberry Library, Chicago, to support a woman doing post-doctoral research at the Library, and $10,000 that same year went to the Interlochen Center for the Arts, Interlochen, Michigan, for an endowed scholarship fund to support young women in pre-professional training in the arts.
The Guide For Women and Girls is one of a series of National Guides. Others, including the National Guide to Funding for Libraries and Information Services and the National Guide to Funding in Higher Education, are arranged in similar fashion. Each book in this series contains bibliographies leading to further reading on grant- seeking in the particular field of interest.
Another excellent general tool is the Grant Seekers Guide, edited by Jill R. Shellow and Nancy C. Stella (3rd edition, 1989), published by the National Network of Grantmakers, a coalition of individuals involved in grant-making who are “committed to social and economic justice” (p.vii). The grant-making programs listed in the Grant Seekers Guide have assets of $1 million or more, grantmaking budgets of at least $100,000 annually, and are interested in funding grassroots-type, progressive projects smaller than the typical listings in the Foundation Center guides. One example is The Funding Exchange, founded in 1979 by young people with inherited wealth. Among the Funding Exchange’s priorities: “Women’s movement activities, including women and work, reproductive rights [and] violence against women” (p.221.)8 In addition to program descriptions, the Grant Seekers Guide contains several chapters addressing strategies and issues involved in such fund-raising, an index of contact people (generally program officers at the foundations), and an index by fields of interest (“women” is one of them).
State directories are also available for most states. Grant-seekers in Wisconsin can consult the biennial Foundations in Wisconsin: A Directory (10th edition, 1990, by Susan H. Hopwood) from Marquette University Memorial Library, Milwaukee, for information on 755 active grant-making foundations in the state. The directory is indexed by county and by area of interest. “Women and girls” is listed under the broader heading “Human Services.” “Higher Education,” “Student Aid,” and “Libraries” all appear under “Education.”
While most foundation money goes to institutions, there are more sources of information on financial aid to individuals. Again, there are standard, general tools such as the Annual Register of Grant Support: A Directory of Funding Sources, Foundation Grants to Individuals and the Directory of Research Grants (16th edition, 1991). The Annual Register covers financial assistance made both directly to individuals and indirectly through payment to sponsoring institutions. It includes study grants and fellowships aimed primarily at graduate and post-graduate levels as well as “construction, facilities or project costs for education, medical research, health care, civic empowerment, etc.” (25th edition, “1992,” published in September, 1991, p.xi). The subject index combines specific subject areas (“Family Life,” “Women’s Issues,” etc.), type of grant (“Construction,” “Higher Education,” etc.), and eligibility/limitations. The first of sixty-six entry numbers under “Women, Eligibility of” leads to the entry for the Directing Workshop for Women of the American Film Institute. Professional women who have had “considerable experience in media arts, but who have not yet had the opportunity to direct” are eligible to apply for cash awards of $5,000 (Entry 593, p.233).
Foundation Grants to Individuals (7th edition edited by Suzanne W. Haile for the Foundation Center, 1991) covers over 2,000 foundations awarding at least $2,000 per year directly to individuals for educational assistance (scholarships, fellowships, loans, internships, residencies, and research grants); general welfare expenses; unsolicited awards and prizes for past achievements; and company employee grants.
The Directory of Research Grants (and its corresponding database “Grants,” updated monthly) describes programs that offer “nonrepayable research funding for projects in medicine, the physical and social sciences, the arts and humanities, and education” (Preface). A keyword thesaurus of terms extracted from program descriptions constitutes the subject index, providing more detailed access to programs than is available in tools with broader subject indexing. This means, however, that terms such as “Women,” “Women’s Education,” “Women’s Studies,” and “Feminism” should be searched in addition to subjects specific to the type of research proposed. One of the listings under “Feminism,” for example, leads to the entry for the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History, an annual award of $1,000 given to the author of a book on women’s history and/or feminist theory that “best reflects the high intellectual and scholarly ideals exemplified by the life and work of the late Joan Kelly” (Entry 2996, p.450).
If you are interested in fellowships, grants, etc. designed primarily for women, you should consult the Directory of Financial Aids For Women 1991-92 by Gail Ann Schlachter. A useful feature of the book is that aid sources are culled from a wide array of sponsors. The first section contains 1,650 entries on support offered by “government agencies, professional organizations, corporations, sororities and fraternities, foundations, religious groups, educational associations, and military/veteran organizations” (p.iv). Section two lists state agencies providing educational support, and the third section is an annotated list of sixty other financial aid directories for women and men. Funding is indexed by program title, sponsoring organization, geographic area, subject, and filing date.
Among the grants described in the are directory several types funded by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. For the final year of doctoral study, AAUW Dissertation Fellowships carry stipends of $12,500. Founders Fellowships offer $25,000 for postdoctoral research by women who received the doctorate degree more than three years prior. AAUW International Fellowships provide $13,000 for advanced study and training for non-U.S. citizens, with most recipients pursuing graduate study or postdoctoral research at U.S. institutions. Various other AAUW Fellowships are also described. Another program providing dissertation is support the Life Patterns/Life Choices Dissertation Award Program of the Henry A. Murray Research Center, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which offers resources to graduate students who think they can “make creative use of Murray Center resources” (p.143). The directory includes some scholarships available to undergraduates, such as the Lillian Moller Gilbreth Scholarship from the Society of Women Engineers for junior and senior women engineering students. (Non-engineers: Gilbreth is the engineer/mother in Cheaper By the Dozen…) The Fund for the Feminist Majority Internship Program in Feminism and Public Policy is one example of the many internships listed. This program provides modest stipends and housing assistance for undergraduates or graduate students interested in working for the Fund as research assistants, writer/assistant editors, and press assistants.9
The National Council for Research on Women produces several useful publications for grant-seeking women. Opportunities for Research and Study 1991-92, compiled by Paulette Tulloch and Debra Schultz (26p., 1991), is the current edition of the Council’s annual compilation of fellowships, affiliated scholar programs, grants, and internships sponsored by member centers of the NCRW. “Why Fund Women and Girls,” quoted above, is a two- page statement developed by NCRW that the Council offers for inclusion in grant applications (NCRW encourages photocopying or quoting from the statement). The Council’s newly released Directory of National Women’s Organizations (1992) includes many useful entries for grant-seekers, such as one for the National Network of Women’s Funds, a coalition of organizations funding women.10
Information on federal grants for both institutions and individuals may be approached through the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (latest is the 24th edition, 1990) using its numerous indexes: program, applicant eligibility, deadline, functional category, and subject. To locate authoritative, current information on budget levels and funding priorities, consult the Federal Register (FR), a daily publication of federal announcements and regulations. For example, the August 26, 1991, issue contained the notice inviting applications for new awards under the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), Comprehensive Program, for Fiscal Year 1992. An estimated 75 awards with an average size of $70,000 were expected to be made to programs seeking to improve postsecondary education.
The January 14, 1992 Federal Register (57 FR 1628) added a Special Focus Competition Invitational Priority: College-School Partnerships to Improve Learning of Essential Academic Subject, Kindergarten Through College. This announcement projected three to six awards averaging $100,000/year each to projects that aim to improve teaching and sequencing of curricula across grade levels. Deadline for applications: March 18, 1992.
How would you know when and where to look in the Federal Register? An excellent index to FR is the Congressional Information Service (CIS) Federal Register Index, published weekly, cumulated periodically, and bound semiannually. It contains subject and name indexes.
One way to keep posted on current sources of funding for women and women’s projects is to scan general current awareness periodicals in the grants field, such as the Academic Research Information System (ARIS) Funding Reports: Creative Arts and Humanities Report; Social and Natural Science Report; and Biomedical Science Report. Each announces governmental and non- governmental sources of funding for institutions and individuals. For easy scanning, application deadlines appear as a boldfaced column. Grassroots Fundraising Journal, published by Kim Klein and Lisa Honig, includes both “how to” suggestions and announcements of current possibilities. The Grantsmanship Center News and The Chronicle of Philanthropy are two other sources of note.
If you wish to track trends, statistics, and themes in the grants periodical literature, try The Literature of the Nonprofit Sector: A Bibliography With Abstracts, an annual index established by the Foundation Center in 1988. One interesting entry in volume 3 of the Bibliography (Entry 27, p.8) is for the article “Young Women Seen As Top Leaders and Backers of Social-Action Causes,” by Kristin A. Goss, which appeared in Chronicle of Philanthropy v.3 (January 15, 1991), pp.21, 24. According to the abstract, this article reports on a survey of five hundred donors, which found that women comprise sixty percent of the donors to such causes as gun control, abortion rights, and environmental protection. Women under forty-five make up almost one-fourth of those donors.
Many of the periodicals in women’s studies have notice columns announcing grant and fellowship opportunities. See the “News” column in the National Women’s Studies Association’s NWSA Journal or “Newsbriefs” in Women’s Studies Quarterly. Newsletters from women’s research centers and other university offices also contain funding announcements. New Directions for Women often spotlights grants to women’s groups.
This article has focused on some fundamental resources for women seeking grants. Hundreds more exist, many directed at other specialized groups (“minorities,” “disabled,” “artists,” etc.) that may also be appropriate to your situation. And, of course, learning about possible sources of funding is not all there is for the grant- seeker to do. Writing a suitable proposal is an art unto itself. But that sounds like another article to me. Meanwhile, have faith that the proposal process, too, can be learned; and let us all work on the public activity necessary to substantially increase the funding for women.
[Many of the resources mentioned in this article are also accessible on-line through Dialog or other information database vendors. The Foundation Directory I and II, National Data Book of Foundations, and National Directory of Corporate Giving constitute one Dialog database; the Foundation Grants Index comprises another. “Grants” is the Dialog database for the Directory of Research Grants and its companion volumes from Oryx Press, and FAPRS (Federal Assistance Programs Retrieval System) corresponds to the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (non-Dialog).]