Being a grant writer can land you in several different places: a university, a non-profit, a small business, or even working freelance or working for an individual.
For Karissa St. Pierre, after graduating with a B.A. in Communications, she chose to work with a local non-profit she had interned at. St. Pierre is a grant writer with over a decade of experience. She works at The Boys and Girls Club of Greater Westfield, a national non-profit organization dedicated to working with kids before and after school. The Boys and Girls Club of America was established in 1860 in Hartford Connecticut, and today has 4,300 different clubs nationally. Through our interview, I got to see what working at a mid-size non-profit is like for a grant writer.
Her daily life changed drastically from when she was working full-time to part-time. As a part-time employee, she works like a contractor and solely focuses on the Club's writing grants. During her time as a full-time employee, she also did communications, newsletters, social media posts, graphic designs, and helped manage donor relations.
She described how creative problem-solving was her favorite aspect of her career,
as well as working with the youth programmers to get their ideas to come to fruition.
The job of a grant writer links several departments together to create proposals, so
having strong collaborative relationships is especially important. The career requires a lot of communication between departments, but especially the marketing, financial, and programming departments.
Related: Grant Writing and Similar Careers
St. Pierre also discussed her frustrations with having to meet so many demands from different groups. She described how it can be difficult to implement a program that the higher-ups at the organization want, but the youth programmers— the ones actually implementing and leading the programs— do not want. Because of this, balancing everyone’s needs can be a real challenge.
Her day-to-day involves grant prospecting, the process of finding requests for proposals (RFPs) and seeing if the Club's needs fit. At a time, they manage several grants both with rolling deadlines and hard deadlines. Having good organization skills is essential as there are multiple grants to keep track of at once.
St. Pierre summed up her positives and negatives of working at a non-profit.
Immediately, fulfillment and passion-driven work came to mind as there are very few
jobs that can be as mission-driven as non-profit jobs. Being able to combine grant
writing with a passion for helping kids is a desirable field.
Although non-profit positions often make less, organizations like to add benefits like increased vacation time to make the positions more worthwhile to employers. But, working at a non-profit has a lot of negatives as well. She described that there’s never enough of anything: never enough staffing, money, support, or time. Many ideas for proposals have to be shut down due to a lack of enthusiasm or limited staffing which makes designing a proposal difficult. She has to spend a portion of her time pitching proposals and why they would make a good fit for the organization.
Because of how vast the work environment can be for grant writer, most typical activities vary. At smaller organizations and businesses, a grant writer might be more hand-on with donor relations and publicity. On the other hand, big organizations could have their grant writers focus just on researching and writing. Depending on what you're looking for, a role in grant writing could be different from organization to organization.
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