Judith Clark, the executive director of the Hawaii Youth Services Network who is also a grant writer, told the participants the key to a successful grant application is to highlight the CNMI’s challenges as an island community.
Equally important is the CNMI’s ability to properly manage grant money, she said.
The public servants were divided into two groups. The first attended the workshop on May 18-19 while the other participated in the workshop on May 21-22.
Clark said some of the participants have no grant writing experience at all while others have significant exposure.
Clark, who will teach a grant writing course at the University of Hawaii this summer, said she was asked to conduct the workshop because the CNMI government wants to build a pool of grant writers for its stimulus team.
“In the past, the CNMI government often had to hire people to write grant proposals for very high rates, or their staff had written proposals that didn’t make the cut, that weren’t quite good enough to get funded so I was asked to come out here and do some skill building,”
Building a capacity
Isidro Seman, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the 60 participants are from various government agencies, departments and autonomous offices.
“The government is well covered here. Most agencies have representatives,” he said.
He said it was decided to bring Clark here rather than send a few to an off-island workshop because the cash-strapped CNMI government wants to maximize its ability to build a pool of grant writers.
Clark’s expenses were covered by federal grants.
“It is part of the governor’s effort to train our government employees. Because of our limited funding it is more cost-effective to bring the trainer here and bring as many people as possible to participate in the workshop,” said Seman.
“All in all it’s a good effort. I think it’s cost-effective. We trained as many people as we could for that amount of money instead of sending just two or three staffers to undergo the training in the U.S. We’re building the capacity for them to be able to help their individual organization, departments, agencies…. So they will be better equipped to be able to write applications for federal grants,” he added.
Clark said although the two-day workshop was too short to fully hone the participants’ grant-writing skill, they were given the basic.
“While we didn’t have the time to write a full grant proposal, they did get a taste of writing and some of the pieces of it. And we also talked about what happens to your grant proposal after it leaves your hand and what can you do in writing to maximize your chances,” she said.
The participants worked with each other to make a compelling case for their mock project as well as create measurable objectives, including a budget.
“So the true test is going to be what happens in the next few months to a year as people go back and try to apply the skills they got,” said Clark.
