My Misunderstanding
Okay, this didn’t happen at my home, but at my office, and just yesterday. It stopped me right in my tracks.
I’ve been spending my week-day afternoons here at the office, working on an assignment to get a grant application ready on behalf of Western Tract Mission. In November the Board had asked the director and me to start applying for grants for our big Impact Canada project. In December an email announced a brand new consortium of 12 Christian foundations pooling some funds to give out some big grants. The application period was to be between Jan. 3-31. I studied their website, strongertogethergrants.ca and felt that we would be a perfect fit to apply. I sent Arnold, our Director, the link and he thought we wouldn’t qualify because we’d have to have an annual budget of more than $150,000. I assure him that no, it said “less than.” So I got a green light.
Their specifications document was available on Jan. 3, and I went to work. Usually I give the mission one hour of my afternoon, but many times I went over to 2 or 3 hours in an afternoon. Last week was especially stressful as I had to get all our financial reports for the past two years and a budget for this year set up neatly.
I had set my heart on posting our completed application yesterday to beat the deadline by one day in case there were any complications. By about 3 pm yesterday I had gone over the whole 9 page document and cover letter with a fine-tooth comb, tweaking and perfecting it as exactly as I could.
But once I had registered and logged in and was answering the five qualifying questions I kept getting an error message that said, “Sorry, but you don’t qualify…”
What?! After several tries and checking on our gov’t registration number with two others, I finally emailed the person we were to contact if we ran into problems. With two time zones between us, I didn’t really expect an answer until today, but the man in charge replied quickly and asked me to give him the answers to those first 5 questions. I did, and a little later I had another reply from him. “Sorry, but you don’t qualify because your annual budget is less than $150,000.”
HUH?!! I went to read that part of their website again. Sure enough I had misread it. Oh no! My heart just sank. All this work - for naught? I’d pushed and prodded others for numbers and proof-reading last week, and I even got the required signatures on Saturday. - Have you ever had a cold flush just wash down through you?
Well, there were other deadlines to meet last night, and the Lord helped with those. Maybe it’s a good thing I had to stay up until midnight to get the first issue of Reflections ready for today. That kept me from having a pity party.
My work is not wasted either. The Board wanted me to really hunt down more foundations to apply to, and now I have all our “ducks in a row” to use a cliche. I have a free membership at Ajah.ca, which is a huge database of foundations, and now I’ll look for other individual foundations to apply to for grants.
No wonder professional grant writers make $100/hr. Whew! They earn it.



