Grant training can be key to crucial funding for equipment, staffing & more. There’s even a FREE way to get training
But how do you get your higher-ups to say yes?
Tell us if this sounds like you and your department: Equipment needs replacing. You need to procure new tools to handle today’s growing challenges and threats to public safety. Personnel will need to train up on how to use those tools. Staffing positions need filling, especially to maintain industry standards and minimums.
There’s just one problem. There’s not enough budget.
However, you’ve been working on the problem. From your legwork, you understand grants are out there that can help make up the shortfall between your agency’s budget and what you need.
You’re not so sure about writing a grant. However, you found out that training is out there, and it can help you become a competitive grant winner.
Now you just need your higher-ups in your agency, or maybe city hall, to approve paying the costs for you to get the training. But how do you convince your governing bodies and administrative officials that grant training is a wise worthwhile investment of your limited training dollars?
How much money has your city or agency invested to assure themselves of having supplemental budget money to carry out operations, for training, equipment and expansion of services? If you are reading this article, the answer is probably “not much.”
The stakes are simple
You see the benefit:
If your locality or agency invests a few hundred dollars, just one time, in you getting this training, you can go on to write strong, competitive grants. Each grant could bring in thousands, possibly millions of dollars to your agency. From 2 days of training, you could spend years writing grants, and that training investment can pay for itself a thousand times over.
But how do you convince the brass, especially when money is already tight?
received a $1,000,000 AFG grant
Grant writing training: You get what you pay for
Since the 2000s, our Certified Grant Consultants have been helping public safety agencies nationwide become winning grant writers.
As the late, great “Grantfather” of public safety grants, Kurt Bradley, liked to say:
“There are two old sayings that ring especially true in grant writing: ‘You get what you pay for,’ and ‘you have to spend a little money, to make a lot of money.’”
Formal training and professional instruction in grant writing can go a long way to helping any public safety or first responder professional become a winning grant winner.
In over 20 years of training Fire, EMS, Law Enforcement, and other pros to add grant writing to their skillsets, we’ve seen students win grant after grant. Some students have even won on their very first application.
The first strategy to apply to your grants program? Train the right person to write grants.
Think of grant writing as just another skill to train for… and use training funds for
You work and train to protect the public. When you train to be a grant writer, mastering grant writing becomes just another skill. It can make your community safer, and your agency better prepared to face today’s threats and challenges.
In the public safety profession, we are held to standards that require training and sometimes certification.
Law enforcement officers, firefighters, EMTs, and others all work through long hours of formal instruction in order to meet certification requirements at the industry, local, state, and/or federal level. Training and certification is a career-long process, too. Many certifications have to be updated or renewed, and new requirements, programs, or responses come into play.
How much time and money do you or your agency spend maintaining certifications?
If you are like most departments, a portion of your annual budgets go to “training funds”. We routinely spend thousands of dollars annually in assuring that our personnel are professional in everything that they do and that they have the certifications needed to prove that point. This reduces the governing body’s liability exposure, and improves incident response.
Ask yourself a question though…
How much money has your city or agency invested to assure themselves of having supplemental budget money to carry out operations, for training, equipment and expansion of services?
If you are reading this article, the answer is probably “not much.”
Grant writing is usually given a low priority until a crisis situation develops.
Grant training can be a one-time cost for an ongoing benefit
When your agency trains someone to write grants, that grant writer can be the cornerstone of an effective grants program strategy.
Unfortunately, grant writing is usually given a low priority until a crisis situation develops.
However, this doesn’t have to be the case in your agency. And, if your agency trains you or another person up as a grant writer, that crisis situation doesn’t have to happen again.
The continual and persistent search for grant monies deserves a place at the top of every chief’s or agency head’s financial strategy. This is especially true under challenging, ongoing economic conditions that force us to do more with less.
Every year, whether from the Federal government, states, non-profit organizations, corporations, and other sources, hundreds of millions of grant dollars are available for agencies just like yours.
In order to get a grant, you have to apply for the grant. If your agency isn’t applying for any of those hundreds of millions of grant dollars though, they won’t get a single buck. They won’t even be in the running.
Think of grant writing training like this: It’s a one-time cost that can pay benefits to your agency for years, even decades, to come.
Why risk not having enough money in your budget to cover what your agency needs, when hundreds of millions of dollars are waiting for the right grant to come along?
We were awarded nearly $10,000
Get the training, to get the grant, to get the gear
The first strategy to apply to your grants program?
Train the right person to write grants.
The return on investment for sending an individual to receive professional grant writing training is enormous.
Our students and clients have an 80% success rate. Their average Return on Investment (ROI) rate is 100:1 within the first year after attending our grant writing training.
It is not unusual for a student to recoup over 100 times the cost of training with the very first grant award they receive after attending.
Grant writing training such as ours is ONLY about public safety grants. We won’t be discussing grants for nonprofits, businesses, or anything else. If it’s related to public safety and first responder grants, then that’s what we’ll be talking about, and all we’ll be talking about.
Your agency maximizes their efforts at receiving a grant award by training someone to fully understand and work through the process of finding and applying for grants. Training gives a public safety grant writer a competitive edge advantage in an ever-more competitive arena.
One grant writer can bring thousands of funding dollars
A well-trained grant writer can, on average, bring in thousands of dollars per year to your agency, and we can provide the references to prove it. In fact, here are just a few:
- “We secured several grants for essential items such as turnout gear and training props. I am thrilled to share that we were recently awarded a 2023 AFG grant for 3 cardiac monitor defibrillators and 3 auto-pulses.” Cynthia Carducci, Southern Polk County Rural Fire District
- “We were awarded the grant for the new livescan fingerprint machine and KLER records management interface. We are up to: $321,999, ARRA Funding; $50,000, 911 Grant; $14,000, Polaris Ranger; $23,000, KS JAG Funding; $1,200, Local Kiwanis Funding. That’s $410,199, and we have about $4,000 invested in training and assistance through you.” Undersheriff Mickey Gruber, Brown County Sheriff, Kansas
- “The Defiance Fire and Rescue Division received a $1,000,000 AFG grant. The grant will be used to purchase a new Aerial, replacing the Division’s 36 year old Aerial.” Chief Wilkins, Defiance Ohio Fire Department
- “We were awarded nearly $10,000 to purchase 35 law enforcement specific tactical trauma medical kits. I credit the success of my first professional grant writing effort to what I learned in your course.” Alexis Davis, Training Coordinator, Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office, Michigan
Ask your higher-ups this question
We’ve worked with public safety pros whose local governments and agency heads scoffed at expending a few hundred dollars to become a trained grant writer.
When this comes up, here’s a question we encourage them to ask the brass:
Would our citizens like it if we could invest more in our public safety needs…without raising taxes or passing the hat?
For only a few hundred dollars, trained grant writers can recoup the cost of training a thousand times over.
That means that not only does your agency recover the cost of the training itself. You can assure your agency of additional funding sources for many, many years to come.
Your own colleagues can tell you the same thing. Reach out to any agency who has an on-staff, professionally trained grants writer, and ask them how much that person is worth. Just about any agency will tell you that their grant writer is a KEY person in the agency, and for good reason: That grant writer has likely brought thousands, possibly millions of dollars of grant funding.
And it can all start with a couple of days of training.
Speaking of that training, there’s also a way to get it for FREE.
How to get FREE professional grant writing training
Folks on social media sometimes ask us if “there’s a grant for the grant training.”
Sometimes that’s coming from someone who’s just trying to be funny. Oftentimes though, it’s coming from someone whose agency or community is so tight on funds, that they really don’t know how it’d be possible to come up with the money.
That’s why we came up with a way for agencies to get our training without having to pay for it.
Agencies who host our training get free seats at the training
That’s right. We’ll repeat it, too:
If your agency hosts our training, we’ll give them free seats. That way, the host agency can send personnel to receive the training, which they can then put to work applying for grants.
When agencies host our training, they also build goodwill with surrounding agencies. We travel all over the country to present our grant writing training. Time and again, for over 20 years, we’ve seen host agencies build up personal and professional bonds with folks from agencies in neighboring areas, or even from other parts of the country.
Given all the challenges our communities face, after all, it never hurts to have a few more friends—not to mention the chance to build up more mutual aid relationships.
Agencies who host our training don’t have to pay for someone to attend. They’ll get free seats they can supply to the personnel they would like to become trained grant writers.
Professional grant writing training is worth it to your agency
We understand the challenges you face: Today’s public safety agencies face bigger challenges than ever, but often have to face them with smaller and smaller budgets.
However, you can make the case to your department, city hall, or town hall that investing in grant writing training can make a world of difference for your agency’s budget and its ability to meet equipment, staffing, training, and other needs.
Plus, we can also talk about hosting training at your agency, and then your agency at host will get free seats.
Professional grant writing training is worth every penny, especially in how it can bring thousands, sometimes millions of dollars of grant funding to your agency.
If you think that’s worthwhile, we can make it happen. Here’s what one student said after attending our training:
“There was more content covered in this class than in all the others I have taken, combined!
Tracey Walters
The course provided proposal structure, funding strategies, pragmatic ways to navigate potential challenges when both writing and submitting a grant, and practical exercises to apply what I had learned.
In addition, the instructor was able to bring his vast knowledge of both law enforcement and fire department experience to life, as he navigated the class through the sharing of stories and the use of actual examples of both funded and non-funded grants.
Whether you are new to grants or are looking to refine your skills, this course is most definitely worth the investment.”
Chief Clerk, Grant & Special Projects Manager
Splendora Police Department, Texas