The address of this site is
http://GollyGrantsOnline.com.
To reach a portal to my syllabi, visit http://gollygrantsonline.com/indexold.htm.
Hello.
I am Dr. Jay S. Mendell (mendelljay@gmail.com), and I would like to be your
grants coach and maybe your grantwriter. The name of the grantwriting part of my
little consultancy is “The Winning Version of the Truth.”
I
hope the truth is that you are ready to receive grant money and spend it
judiciously, that you are adept at running your nonprofit, and that you are
clear about what you want to do and how you will do it. I hope that the truth is
that you are a clear thinker and are not afraid of collaboration.
If
obtaining a grant puzzles you or you are simply overloaded. that’s where I
come in.
If
you have difficulty in expressing all of your dedication, determination, and
imagination in a written grant proposal of 3 to 30 pages, you need a coach and
maybe a grantwriter.
As
your consultant, I will lead you to one or several prospective funding sources
and tell them your story, taking care to use the language that one nonprofit
professional expects to hear from another. (That’s essential, as it
establishes credibility and builds rapport.)Maybe we should start with a letter
of proposal, a. k. a. “mini-proposal.”
Here
is some biographical information. I have a Ph. D. degree, with coursework in
physics and a dissertation in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in 1964. (I am also a 1958 graduate of Vanderbilt University with an
M. A.)
Over
fifty years, I have evolved from engineer, to business planner, to engineering
associate professor, to business professor, and finally to tenured full
professor of nonprofit management with a teaching specialty in grantwriting and
fundraising.
People
usually know where to find me, since when I retired in 2007, I handed over my
car keys, and now I generally work at home on various projects involving
nonprofits and social ventures, but only projects that excite me
During
my fifteen years as a nonprofit professor, I coached and edited 300 students
writing 300 grants, many of which were submitted and funded for hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
I
am very patient with first-time grant applicants. You might say that patience
with neophytes is a specialty with me, though I do insist that the applicant
must be involved and not dump all the work on the grantwriter.
I
keep in touch with my friends and clients via long-distance telephone, Internet
telephone to Central and
I
have free and easy electronic access to a proprietary commercial database of
grant making foundations and agencies and I can catch a car ride to a database
of corporate funders. Further, for my personal development, my former university
has let me keep my electronic passcode to hundreds of research databases, which
is something that very few grantwriters can claim.
Thank you for reading this far. Now I have something
for you, a gift. Go to http://black-sheep-library.com, and you can please
download a free copy of my 2006 book, Black
Sheep Fundraising: Rethinking Major Gifts for Your Stigmatized Nonprofit. Except
for the cover, it is all there, the entire book.
Following several years of consulting for a recovery
center, I wrote a book on fundraising for nonprofit causes misunderstood,
unpopular, or seen as undeserving, unworthy, unwholesome, defective, silly, or
worthless. Of course, this might not be how you see I
am simply mentioning that stigmatized nonprofits happen to be another specialty
for me...
My
book on stigmatized causes is for sale on Amazon.com and practically all the
other online booksellers. You can also walk into a bookstore in the mall and
special-order ISBN 0-9779323-0-3. Or you can go to http://black-sheep-libray.com
and download copy. The reason that I want you to take a free copy is that there
are already thousands of electronic copies circulating on the Internet,
effectively killing sales. (This I know because I hear from people every week.)
If the book is not going to make me wealthy, at least let it be widely read.
Speaking of documents widely read, if you make me your grantwriter, I will not show copies of work that I do on your behalf to my prospective clients, your prospective competitors, my students, or anybody. Whatever I write for you is your intellectual property to use in subsequent proposals. If you choose to turn it loose (not a great idea), don’t be surprised if it turns up all over the Internet.