Here’s Derek’s commentary on our two days of grant writing training this week:
Yesterday, Veronica and I completed two days of grant training for a State agency in Sacramento. It was lots of fun. I’ve delivered grant writing training in the past on my own, but I haven’t ever teamed up to deliver it. I think the participants benefitted a lot from having two grant writers giving hints and ideas from their experiences.
As we navigated through our daily agenda, I was reminded of how much there is to learn about grant writing and how much of it is learned by doing (and making mistakes) if you don’t have a good teacher and mentor. I’d like to believe that Veronica and I helped these folks move along the road to becoming highly competent grant writers, but I know that some of what we said probably went in one ear and out the other simply for lack of experience and ability to put the information into context. Hopefully they took good notes and the stuff they didn’t completely understand will become clear as they begin to write grants.
People holding jobs with the state often get a bad rap so let me just say that the fifty or so people whom we trained were on time, on task, and they were enthusiastic learners. Not only that, the people who organized the training were competent, available, and welcoming. It was refreshing and hopeful to see that there are so many quality people working in state government.
My boss and I gave a comprehensive 1-day overview of grant writing. At the end of each day, participants could see that there is a lot more to know – and there is – so maybe we will be brought back for a second round of training.
Some companies make grant writing training a dry topic but we have ways to spice it up which are so good, so innovative, and so darned special that if I share them here our competitors will steal them from us (you’ll have to attend to find out – no industrial spying allowed either). We were thankful to receive many positive comments on our evaluations so we’re pretty confident our methods worked. All in all, we spent a fun couple of days with a bunch of great people: what more can we ask for!?
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