No Day Like Today

Well, I finished my grantsmanship training. It was a fabulous week-long certification course in grant proposal writing and non-profit program development. I learned so many valuable principles and got to work on a team to prepare and submit a grant for review. The program we were proposing is part of an actual working non-profit organization called Chosen Children's Kinship Placement. They work to place children, who have lost their parents due to HIV/AIDS, into foster care with their family members, rather than institutionalize them in orphanages. There is extensive research done on the value of this model over the typical western warehousing model. It's an interesting paradigm because Western countries are generally all about funding orphanages over any other model because of efficiencies of space/personnel. But, in the West we do not put our children in orphanages, we use a foster care/kinship placement model. The hypocrisy is glaring. Anyway, I hope they get their funding. We all worked hard and the hours we spent represent only the tiniest fraction of time the project founder has spent.


Learning the grantsmanship process was both informative and entertaining and I'm glad I went. Still, I am plagued with questions of where to go from here. I have text books that I'm trying to make my way through. I spend an average of an hour per chapter just reading, then there are assignments that will take hours to complete. I have papers to write on top of the regular homework and, in all, I estimate I have a good 360-450 hours of work ahead of me just for my classes. I'm not sure when I'm going to devote any time to my business of saving the world, but for today I did take time to reconnect with my husband while the house was all quiet, and I did read to my children for a little longer than usual.