I’m uploading today’s sample grant in honor of Blog Action Day ‘09 and its theme of climate change.

There’s a perception that low-income advocacy and environmentalism are incompatible. Yet, I’m a life member of the Sierra Club as well as a Certified Community Action Professional (a designation conferred by today’s version of the War on Poverty organizations).

And that’s why I love this project. It allowed me to marry these two long-time interests. There must be a romantic project title in there somewhere, something to do with tilting at windmills with windmills, but I settled on a plain brown wrapper of a title.

Sample Grant Proposal Summary

The proposal describes an innovative source of energy assistance for low-income families. Nonprofits develop wind energy (turbines sited on property they own or control) and trade the power generated to local utilities for energy assistance credits. The credits are then transferred to LIHEAP eligible families as needed, often during the winter to offset high heating bills.

The grant proposal was funded for three years for a total of $1 million. The funding agency was the Office of Community Services (DHHS).

See the FULL GRANT PROPOSAL HERE (PDF).
or HERE (HTML).