When small nonprofit agencies go looking for funds, often they turn to grants … if, that is, they know how to seek them in the first place. But for many community-facing nonprofits throughout Alabama, there’s often a big difference between knowing about an available grant and actually knowing how to apply for it.
There’s a pretty specific slate of paperwork and procedures that accompany an official ask for grant funding from federal, state, and even private sources — and often, small nonprofits lack the staffing and expertise to navigate it. Recognizing that knowledge gap in the hope of closing it, county agents from the Cullman and Marshall County offices of the Alabama Cooperative Extension System (ACES) began earlier this year to host grant writing workshops; session aimed at community agencies designed to equip them directly with the training that’s needed to seek grant funds on their own.
Judging from the response to the latest workshop, held Aug. 3 at Camp Meadowbrook near Fairview, they may just be onto something, says Cullman County Extension coordinator Kira Sims. More than 70 people representing nonprofits from across north Alabama — as well as one group all the way from Coffee County — left this month’s event encouraged at the discovery of how accessible the grant writing process can be.
“One of the big-picture goals for this program is just making people aware that the Extension [service] can do these community development type of events,” said Sims. “When most people think ‘Cooperative Extension,’ they may think, ‘Oh, they do soil samples, agriculture, even 4-H.’ But we’re moving into this realm of trying to do more, locally, in assisting our communities beyond just that scope.
“We hosted our first workshop in March with the idea that we start at the beginning,” she added, “because we realized that a lot of people are starting at a basic level. It was successful: We had more than 50 people there. We could tell that they weren’t done learning — and we already had planned to do a second one — and that ended up morphing into the one we just held, based on feedback that we got from the first one. My Extension colleagues and I, as a team, don’t have the grant writing background to actually teach these workshops, so we reached out to the people in the community we knew would have that kind of background. Based on the feedback, people were really engaged.”
In the recent past, teaching community agencies how to write their own grant applications hasn’t been a routine feature of ACES’ roster of services. But Sims said she’s hopeful that the strong response to the Cullman County workshops points the way toward their potential expansion into other regions of Alabama.
“We anticipate hosting another one of these next year locally, but moving forward, our broader goal is to make this type of program replicable across the state for other Extension offices,” she said.
“Local support is a big part of it, and we could not have hosted our workshop without significant support from the Cullman County Master Gardeners, the Cullman Lions Club, Merchants Bank, and Alabama Farm Credit. Thanks to their generosity, we were able to supply our guests a really healthy meal using locally-sourced ingredients from [Cullman catering company] Chat & Chew. We wanted to feed people well while showing how all of this ties back to being a community-focused program, and our sponsors really stepped up to help make the entire event a success.”