3.1 Grants

What Are Grants?

A grant refers to a financial award to your group or organization to carry out the mental health promotion project you have proposed. Grants are sometimes given in resources other then cash (e.g. travel expenses, time off work) and occasionally, especially for research, are made to individuals as well as groups. In this section we’ll focus particularly on cash grants to groups, because they are the most relevant to local-level mental health promotion initiatives.

Show me the money

There are many reasons why a grant could be helpful to a mental health promotion initiative -- getting a grant may enable you to do work that might never get done otherwise. Mental health promotion projects take time. Receiving funding may allow you to pay salaries and cover expenses that arise as a result of starting a new community venture. In many situations, grants are desirable; in some, they are essential.

There are cases, however, when securing financial resources is not necessary to build an effective community response to a mental health problem. Many local mental health promotion initiatives can and do operate with little or no funding. When you think about it, there are times when you can do a great deal of work to promote mental health with very little money, or no money at all. Organizing a meeting, holding an event, getting local policies changed -- these and other community actions are either cost-free or come with very modest price tags.

Be careful what you wish for

There are also times when having funding can become an actual drawback. Someone has to figure out how to spend the funds, make the payments, keep the records and be accountable for it. Also, when money becomes a part of the equation, the all-volunteer, let’s-everyone-pitch-in spirit of the project can become threatened. Sometimes we are better sticking to the non-cash resources that are available to us. We will talk about the benefits of alternative sources of support later in this chapter.

Before you decide to apply for a grant, you should be clear about your reasons for applying. The following questions might help you to clarify those reasons:

• What are my true long-term program goals?
  
  
• Can I do the same work as well, or almost as well, without grant money? What will I actually use the money for?
  
  
• Am I planning to apply simply because the grant funds are potentially available?
  
  
• Is a grant the only way (or the best way) to do what I want to do?
  
  
• Are there other (and perhaps better) ways of getting the money I need?
  
  
• Am I clear on my realistic chances of success in being awarded a grant?
  
  
• Am I prepared to commit the time and energy to producing a top-quality grant proposal?

You should discuss these questions with the members of your group and come to a decision together. Your group’s careful and honest answers to these questions will shape your next steps, which might or might not involve grant writing.

Back to top

When Could A Grant Be Helpful?

There are a number of scenarios where applying for a grant might be your best course of action:

• when you want to start a new mental health promotion project, or expand an existing project, and financial costs are involved;

• when these costs cannot be covered by accessing existing community resources;

• when you know of a granting agency that makes awards to cover the types of costs you envision;

• when you know you meet the eligibility requirements for such awards;

• when you are able to commit the needed time and energy to the grant-writing process.

After considering the above questions and guidelines, perhaps your thinking about funding will change, or you’ll decide to support your work in some other way. There may be a number of options besides grants available to you, such as support from local service associations such as Rotary and Lion’s Club. It’s worth looking into all of the potential sources of support that are out there.

But perhaps, after assessing your resource needs, you’ll decide that you want to write a grant proposal after all.

Back to top

How Do You Apply For Grants?

Grants can be a wonderful way of supporting community mental health promotion work, but obtaining and administering a grant can be a real challenge.

There are two main steps involved in seeking a grant. The first is the preliminary work - preparing and researching, and the second is writing the proposal itself.

First of all you have to find the right source. There are three main sources of grants:

• the government often federal, sometimes provincial and occasionally local;

• private business and corporations;

• foundations.

Before you begin the process of finding the right funder for your mental health promotion project, it’s helpful to think strategically about how you are going to proceed.

There are many thousands of potential granting agencies’ -- how can you find the ones most suitable for your mental health promotion project? It takes some research, but there are many resources you can use to make your search easier. Some of those resources are located in the Tools section of this chapter, where you will find a section covering guidelines for grantsmanship, and a short list of potential funding contacts and helpful fundraising websites.

After completing the preliminary research, you’re ready for the second step - writing the grant proposal. You’ll find a number of helpful tips ahead in the section called "Tips for writing a proposal".

Back to top

When the Funder's Perspective Does Not Quite Fit Yours

We may have come a long way in changing our approach to mental health issues from a deficiency focus to one that builds on individual and community capacity, but many funding programs have not kept pace with that shift. Most funders of community activity have traditionally asked that proposals begin with a "needs" or "problem" statement, often reinforced with a "needs survey".

A statement of community need is a value-laden statement. On one hand, it acknowledges people’s rights and entitlements as citizens, and contains an implicit notion of what constitutes an acceptable minimum standard of personal and community well-being.

On the other hand, using the language of needs has often obscured the political or ideological nature of the issue. Instead of focusing on the particular problem or issue at hand, discussion of need can divert attention to the more technical (and safer) question of providing solutions. It draws us away from questions about why things are the way they are in our communities, and has often led to the development of more services, without first analyzing the root causes of the problem.

This needs or deficiency-based format is at odds with a capacity-focused approach of mental health promotion, which encourages people to maximize the use of their own skills and resources to solve problems. Because the criteria most funders use to assess eligibility continue to reflect a needs-oriented approach, sometimes we have to "play the game" and frame our mental health promotion initiative in the terms that they set out.

Back to top

3.2 In-Kind Support >