Serving the Pie

I am currently reading letters of intent for possible Request For Proposal(RFP)s. I sit on a board wit has access to a small pot of money, a few hundred thousand maybe a half a million over a year’s time, which we grant out to agencies and organizations which come up with a new, better way to disseminate skills and programs to people with disabilities and their families through out the state.
I have been on this board more then ten years and I have gone through as many funding cycles. The grants are puny—I cannot believe as many people contend for them as do. I guess money is money and when you are a “small fish” and nutrient on the top of the pond is worth fighting your way up to the surface for.

I never really paid attention to this board before a couple of years ago. It was just some board I was assigned to go to about 12 15 years ago when I labored in another vineyard. I often got these assignments when the executive director did not want to participate in the event but wanted to keep the agency a part of them project. Anyway, a fairly decent lunch four of six times a year. We first do these Letters of Intent then we decide what we want to consider and ask for the RFPS and then we have to read the submitted proposals and adjudicate who should get the money. Of course what I have outlined is a bit simplistic but essentially the way it is. Like I said I did not think much of this until one of my buddies became an executive director himself and started writing for some of this money. He tried and tried and tried but as of yet has never made it past the first rounds. I actually helped get his Letter of Intent accepted to the proposal stage My buddy has become so discouraged in the process he does not submit anymore swearing the process is fixed and the same people or programs continue to get the funding. He may be right. I don’t know how to change this system or even if there is a way to change this system.

The proposals are quite lengthy and much of the proposal is just boiler plate. The proposals have to be read though and so I do. Some years there may be as many as 30 –40 proposals! This takes a couple or weekends. What I have noticed that many of the proposals are the same as the proposal the agency submitted in the last round. The director just changed the cover page and submitted the document. This really began to piss me off when I recognized this behavior. These guys were too lazy to think of a new project. They were just recycles. The other thing which really irritated me was that there is no thinking going on “out there” no originality. I am beginning to make comments on the papers as caustic as Simon Cowell of American Idol. Every once in a while a good proposal does surface, and when it does I really am delighted.