Creating a Strengths Based Grant Team

By Diane H. Leonard, GPC

When putting together a team for a grant team for an organization, you need to make sure that you have all of your key positions covered within the players at the table:

• Head grant writer/professional;
  
  
• Finance director/staff;
  
  
• Program director/vice president/manager that will be responsible managing the implementation of the program;
  
  
• Grant manager for funded programs in your organization if that role is different than the grant writer;
  
  
• Representatives from your collaborative partners for the project; and
  
  
• Your evaluator/data guru (whether they be internal or external).

 

In addition to identifying the key members of your grant team, you need to have someone who is ultimately facilitating/coaching the team and inviting others to the team to sub in as necessary, be it an Executive Director, Town Supervisor, or Grants and Foundations Director.

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The actual titles and roles of individuals that you may call to the table as part of your grant team may also vary by community, but the idea of having a formal team pulled together as early in the grant discussion as possible will greatly strengthen your application.  Rather, I recommend approaching your team composition from a strengths based approach.  Think about the strengths that each of the potential players brings to the table assessing a strong kicker or wide receiver or in the grant team a strong budget developer or a strong program evaluator.  I also recommend creating a core team of those intimately familiar with the grant application, process, and details of the application and then a secondary team of those who are supportive of the effort and familiar with the project and application, but are not necessarily needed at all meetings or on all email exchanges and draft reviews.
 

In my upcoming post in September, I’ll outline how to effectively use your new grant team once established.  Then we’ll bring everything together in a great one hour live and interactive webinar on October 8th that is being hosted by Grants Management Systems, Inc.  You can see the details about that webinar and register here.