From the Ashes

Most proposals are built on track records, years of program data, audited financials, and organizational credibility. This life-changing proposal and the powerful story behind it was built on the life of a woman who had grown up with every advantage — a stable home, loving parents, and financial security. Her life was almost perfect until addiction entered the picture. Addiction does not negotiate with advantage. It finds its way in anyway, and when it does, it can take everything. This story begins there, where everything was lost. 

The lead character in this story lost her children. She lost her freedom and then, in a jail cell, she found something she hadn’t expected. Faith arrived as a turning point that reorganized everything that came after it. From her jail cell, she gave her life to Jesus Christ and began the hard, unglamorous work of rebuilding. She fought her way back through a system not designed to make that journey easy. She served her time in jail and then she eventually got her children back. The arduous process and her newfound faith led her on to help others and start a ministry for those who found themselves on that same hard journey.

Her new ministry was not a polished nonprofit. It was born out of one woman’s conviction that what she had survived, other women could survive too, if someone would just show them how. She offered temporary housing, job search support, and a guide through the same custody system she had navigated herself. And this is where I was privileged to enter her story, one she told me without flinching. She wasn’t trying to perform or provide me with a  carefully managed narrative. She simply shared her truth, told by someone who had made peace with all of it. She was deeply connected in her small community. People wanted to see her succeed. She was an underdog — and I wanted to help her.

The grant we decided to pursue first was a competitive corporate giving program designed to recognize community heroes. She did not have prior relationship with the funder. She had no track record to point to. But she had a powerful story combined with a lot of grit and determination. I could hardly wait to get my fingers on the keyboard to tell her story.

Along the way our team helped her build the organizational foundation her ministry needed — strategic plan, board training, policies and procedures. But when it came to the proposal, the strategy was simple. We were going to tell the truth, all of it. We wrote her story the way she had told it to me — without softening the hard parts, without rushing past the jail cell or the lost custody or the crash that preceded the comeback. We determined that the hard parts were the point. They were the source of everything she was now building.

When the word came that she had won the grant, I was thrilled the way you are when an underdog beats the odds. She was overcome with gratitude. For her, this was not just a grant. It was confirmation of the calling, of the work, of the idea that her story, the one she had once been ashamed of, was now the very thing opening doors. And this was a big $50,000 door along with having her story told across the metro area. All of this happened for a brand-new ministry, headquartered in a small town, founded by a woman who had walked out of jail not long before.

As a result of this major win combined with the determination of the leader and our services to help build the organization’s infrastructure, the organization served its community faithfully for many years. The women they housed and guided carried something forward with them and so did I.

|Some of the lessons we learned through this proposal process included the truth that data matters. Track records matter.   Organizational capacity matters. But there are moments when the most powerful thing in a grant application is simply the truth of   a human life — told honestly, told courageously, and trusted to speak for itself.

This type of promising experience is what leads most grant writers to stay up late until they get the story just right or to get up before the alarm goes off because a new thought emerged they just had to add while it was still fresh in their minds! Grant writers are likely to be people who are highly organized and love to use data to back up their claims. But deeper still is the desire to give others a hand up and to tell a story that reaches the readers mind, heart and, our ultimate aim, their wallets! This is one grant that I will never forget. 

Pathways to Growth has been walking alongside nonprofits for over 20 years — through the wins, the losses, and everything in between.

This series is drawn from those years: real situations, real stakes, real lessons.

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