Grant

Grant Writing Reflection:

My group was assigned to compose a grant for the Walmart Foundation, an organization dedicated to giving back to local communities in order to create more opportunities, so that people can live better lives. Luckily, the Walmart Foundation’s mission statement was broad, so we had a variety of directions to go in while creating our work. We decided to focus on the educational aspect of NICE, explaining their programs and strides toward aiding children and adults in learning English and other subjects. By doing this, NICE is equipping individuals with the necessary preparation in furtherance of gaining more opportunities and higher qualities of life in America. After our discussion with Debbie, we knew that our grant had to be short and sweet, while still maintaining the genuine spirit of NICE. Keeping in mind that conciseness is key, we decided to delegate parts of the grant to each individual member of the group. My portion consisted of the Organization Information and the Organization’s Mission Statement, and while the organization information was very simple, the mission statement was a bit more of a challenge. At first, I did not know whether to attempt to utilize pathos within the mission statement or whether I should take a purely matter-of-fact approach. Ultimately, I settled on something in between, describing the compassion with which NICE operates all of their programs under, while still explaining their objectives in a succinct manner. I was sure to include NICE’s core values and goals, so as to showcase the organization's values, which is an important element of NICE. Following the meeting with Debbie, I knew that my audience would be able to detect “fluff,” and so I aimed to keep the mission statement as clear and correlated to the Walmart Foundation’s mission statement as possible.

While I did not personally compose the other few sections of our grant, I did collaborate on them and do quite a bit of the editing, and the writing choices used in these sections generally followed the same method as mine. In the grant’s Current Activity section, we briefly explained NICE’s immigration, employment, and resettlement programs, and then delved into their educational programs. Using statistical evidence, we compendiously reported our organization’s exemplary aims toward helping immigrants become sufficiently educated, tying it back to Walmart’s goal of creating more opportunities. In the Proposed Program section, we kept our writing particularly businesslike, providing a brief background of education in Metro Nashville and it's connection to our program, before further explaining our comprehensive program. Even though each section was written by a different group member, I was surprised and satisfied to find that our language choices were all very similar, which allowed for a good flow.

Overall, I would describe our grant as concise, informative, and passionate. While it is certainly difficult to make a grant creative, I genuinely do believe that ours will stand apart from other organization’s. The class meeting with Debbie was extremely helpful and taught me that a successful grant must correspond with what and who the foundation is looking to donate to, while simultaneously remaining condensed and explanatory. These two pieces of advice strongly influenced my compositional choices and allowed me to create a piece of writing that will hopefully gain additional financial support for NICE.