Purpose of the Program
So what is the purpose of your program? You might be able to answer that question in two or three words: alleviate hunger; purchase library books; vaccinate children; find a cure; make a film. Unfortunately, you can’t stop there. The funder knows that any number of organizations have programs that work toward the same purpose, so you must show why your charity should receive a grant to pursue this goal.
A strong, even bold, statement of purpose at the beginning of a proposal can grab the reader’s attention and set an ambitious tone for the rest of the proposal. For example:
Community Food Bank will provide two meals daily to 100 homeless people, none of whom are now reached by any other agency.
Nonprofit managers attending the Managing Your Board workshops will come away with the knowledge and skills to transform their relationships with their boards, resulting in more productive nonprofits throughout the city.
The music workshops we propose will give the forgotten children in the city’s homeless shelters a new sense of identity.
Note that in each of these examples, I used the helper verb will instead of would. Will makes a more positive statement, implying that the project will go forward no matter what. Would is weaker, implying that the project is not only conditional on this grant coming through but perhaps on other factors as well.
HOW TO SAY IT
Beginning grant writers often hesitate to make bold, sweeping statements, having been taught in English classes to avoid generalizations and not to make any unsubstantiated statements. Sweeping statements are a means of getting the reader’s attention, and although you need to support your assertions somewhere in the proposal, the substantiation doesn’t necessarily have to immediately follow your bold declaration.
You should always create a one-sentence summary that describes the project’s essence in a way that makes a strong case for funding. And it should be a really good sentence! If you can’t do that, you don’t understand the project well enough to write the proposal. Review your notes and talk again with people involved in the program until you can write one dynamite sentence.
A good accompaniment for your bold statement (and possibly preceding it) is a dramatic and surprising statistic related to your project, such as:
2,800 adults and 1,200 children in our city go to sleep hungry every night.
98 percent of nonprofit executives identify working productively with their boards as one of their top three issues.
The 400 children living in our city’s largest homeless shelter have no access to after-school activities.
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