Oops, never mind

For the last week and a half I've been working on the Penn Council on the Arts Youth Empowerment Grant. It's been a great experience. I've had to do more research on Paper Wings than I've normally done before. Deb and I also decided that it was time to create an actual document where we describe exactly what Paper Wings is and answer many of the most common questions we get about the program. This way we can cut and paste a majority of the answers we need and refine them to fit in with the particular grant we're writing.
Well, this morning Deb comes to me and says that we can't apply for the grant because they offer too much money. The lowest grant they offer is $25,000 and Paper Wings never spends more than $10,000 in one year. I guess my idea of going for a $50,000 grant and paying me $40,000 to work there for the next year wouldn't fly, oh well.
It's been a great experience, I now have a new document on paper Wings that we'll go through sometime soon and set it up for future use.
I started to work on another grant but Brenna wants to speak with Deb about it more, they're not even sure about applying for it. I had to leave early for meetings today but I'll get the goods tomorrow and see where they want to go with everything.

March 6, 2010

Last week not much happened. I went in Tuesday and began to help them with the 1678 application. I pretty much copied and pasted last year's narrative into a new document and began work on updating it. Sometimes that's all grant work is, updating. Thursday I went to the career fair at St. Joe's, what a f-ing joke! Most of them were looking for nothing more than salesmen or telemarketers. What the hell kind of job is that for a college graduate. You don't need an education for either one of those jobs, I know, I've done them both. That's why I went back to school so I would never have to do that again. Or they were looking for interns which is fine for a summer gig if you're still an undergrad. Anyway, I was so disappointed in my experience there I immediately went online and did my own job fair. I looked up jobs I want and applied for a bunch of positions I know I can and want to do. One of them is a paid internship with the Philly Fringe festival doing development and fundraising. I'm also applying to other internships that are supported through the Samuel Fels fund. They're paid internships with a $6,000 stipend. Not bad for three months of work and it's a good resume builder. And then of course Friday was a snow day.
This week I went in everyday, which I love. I really enjoy going to the theatre, it's work that I like and it makes me feel good. I actually miss it when there are snow days or I'm sick. Deb and I made a list of things that needed to be done. Some of it was internet research which I'm getting better at, but still not great at.
The big project though was the Delaware Valley Grant application. DVG has a general grant form that several organizations accept so using it makes it easy to apply for several at once. Deb told me she started it once some time ago but it's a very daunting application so she never finished it. Now it's my turn to take a crack at it. So far not too difficult. I got most of the attachments in one file and began work on the narrative. We need to find out how the application is submitted, however. Deb thinks we use one application and send it off to the organizations themselves. I'm under the impression we send it to DVG and the organizations get the app from them, so we need to find that out.
And in other good news Brenna said she would try to get a list of actors together that I can contact about possibly doing a staged reading of my thesis play.