February 16, 1967
Page 3690
GRANTSMANSHIP
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I believe that every Member of the Senate is aware of the problems of local officials in preparing applications for financial assistance under the many Federal grant programs. They not only have difficulty in identifying the appropriate Federal program for the particular local need, but often they cannot "write" an application that is complete or descriptive enough to justify approval by the administering agency.
Because some communities do not have the staff and cannot afford to retain persons skilled in grantsmanship, they may fail to obtain aid for much needed facilities and services. On the other hand, some communities with talented grantsmen have obtained more funds for a project than could be spent wisely.
The Wall Street Journal of November 22, 1966, carried an interesting account by Staff Reporter Lewis Phelps on the role of the specialist in writing and rewriting grant applications. After reading this article, one wonders whether the receipt of a grant may depend more upon the cleverness of the person preparing the application than upon real needs.
No community should be at a disadvantage in securing needed assistance merely because of inability to prepare a high-powered application. I believe that State governments have major responsibilities and great opportunities to assist in such matters; and some States, most notably those with offices of local or urban affairs, have already made progress in this direction. States which have not yet begun to gear up for an active role in working with local units of government to solve community problems should give serious attention to the admonition, now often repeated, that it is this kind of activist role that affords the greatest opportunity for their maintaining a meaningful position in the federal system.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the article on grantsmanship, published in the Wall Street Journal, be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
GRANTSMANSHIP: NEW SPECIALISTS HELP COMMUNITIES, OTHERS WIN FUNDS FOR PROJECTS – "GRANTSMAN" JONES SALVAGES A SHAKY PLEA IN OKLAHOMA; TOO GOOD FOR PUBLIC GOOD? – THE FINE ART OF REWRITING
(By Lewis Phelps)
Mickey Mantle gave the town of Picher, Okla., (Pop. 2,556) a source of civic pride by learning to play baseball there as a boy. But it was for Robert Jones that Picher reserved the title of Honorary Mayor, and he has never even lived there.
Mr. Jones isn't a baseball player, either, but he has been in there pitching. In 1964 he converted an apparently doomed request by the town fathers of Picher into a $71,000 grant from the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity.
Mr. Jones is a "grantsmen, " one of a growing breed of specialists with lengthy titles – such as Coordinator of Technical Assistance – who help communities and others obtain funds for projects. The War on poverty has created a big demand for the grantsmen's services and has all but eliminated any poverty they themselves might ever have felt.
So far, at least, grantors, grantees and grantsmen all praise the trend toward hiring professional grant-seekers. "It's almost impossible for anyone to get money from us – at least without a great deal of delay and frustration – if they don't have professional technical help," says a Midwest official of the Office of Economic Opportunity, or OEO. Adds a San Francisco OEO man: "The little indigenous committees in poor areas just don't understand the forms."
ARE THEY TOO GOOD?
Indeed, the only controversy seems to be over whether the grantsmen are doing too good a job. Some critics of the poverty program claim the abilities of the grantsmen rather than the needs of communities are determining where the Federal money is going. They also contend the grantsmen are creating a superabundance of aid on each coast, close to big research-conscious universities whose professors serve as part-time grantsmen for lucrative fees.
They point to, among other places, Contra Costa County, Calif., a generally well-to-do area west of Oakland. Moving swiftly, the county, with the help of a grantsman, grabbed $3 million in Federal poverty funds. "That's more money than they can possibly know what to do with," says a planning official in a nearby area. "I seriously question whether they have enough trained personnel to run all the projects properly."
Contra Costa County officials, of course, disagree. Richard Sax, who heads a county agency set up to coordinate fund getting, says that even though the county's average family income is among the highest in the U.S. there are serious pockets of poverty in the county.
He concedes, though, that speed played an important part in the getting of the grant. "We had our application in Washington practically before the ink dried on President Johnson's signature" in 1964, he says.
FUNDS FOR THE GRANTSMEN
If grantsmen do well for their clients, they don't do badly for themselves, either. Two years ago, a typical grantsmen could make about $75 a day. Now, it's up to about $100 a day, with some making as much as $125 a day. OEO rules allow consultants to take up to 3 percent of the grant, though grantsmen seldom take that much. Mr. Jones was making $17,800 a year as coordinator of poverty fund grant-getting in Oklahoma when he helped out Picher. Now, he makes $25,000 a year as director of community mobilization for Urban America Inc., a private, nonprofit concern in New York that provides consulting and other services on many phases of urban affairs. Some college professors regularly make $15,000 to $20,000 a year as part-time grantsmen.
But the clients say the fees are usually worth it. Consider the history of the Picher grant.
Situated in a depressed mining district – the town's old lead-zinc slag heaps rise so high they're officially listed as navigational aids for pilots – Picher had no writers or lawyers to draw up an application for Federal aid, a local citizen recalls. "Their original application would have been a joke except it was so pathetic," says an OEO administrator. "It was done very sketchily and they wanted exorbitant amounts of money." The town had requested $250,000, much of it for renovating city facilities and funding lavish welfare programs.
Mr. Jones, a University of Oklahoma urban renewal expert before taking his State post, also received a copy of the application. He drove to the town, talked the city fathers into lowering their sights to $133,000 and rewrote the request to stress social and health services for the citizens. He also proposed to house the program in an existing building, rather than asking for new construction. The OEO cut the program further, then granted $71,000.
THE ART OF REWRITE
Rewriting is often the key. When the San Francisco OEO office received a rather vague request for "purposeful investment. in manpower development," it said "no." But when another request for much the same program came in offering to "prepare unskilled, uneducated low-income groups to perform duties heretofore considered to be the sole province of the professional" and listing tasks to be assigned to 15 low-income workers, the OEO swiftly parted with $62,000.
"Once upon a time the bleeding heart outfits could say 'Give us money to do good,' but it doesn't work that way any more," says Harry Specht, a grant consultant in Richmond, Calif.
As in any profession, reputation can have a lot to do with a grantsman's success. "You begin to know which ones write the sound proposals," says Thomas Cutler, an OEO field representative in New York City. One grantsman with a sound reputation is Mitchell Sviridoff, until recently the $25,000-a-year director of New Haven, Conn.'s Community Progress Inc. and now head of the Human Resources Administration in New York City.
In his four years in New Haven, Mr. Sviridoff was credited with obtaining $5 million from the Ford Foundation, $6 million from the Office of Economic Opportunity, $2 million from the Labor Department and $2 million from other sources, all for New Haven projects. That, plus another $6 million that went directly to the city instead of to his agency – but which he helped grab – brought the total to$21 million, or $125 for every resident of New Haven. "Money," says Mr. Sviridoff, "is no longer a problem for us."
"Since we have the reputation for delivering the goods with every grant we've gotten so far, agencies actually come to us if they have money they want to spend," says a staff member of the New Haven organization.
Mr. Sviridoff never went to college. He picked up experience as a fund-raiser in his posts as officer of a labor union, president of the Connecticut state CIO, president of the New Haven Board of Education and administrator in the Alliance for Progress program of aid for Latin America.
Most fund-raisers, however – and there now are more than 400 in their year-and-a-half old professional society, with the number expected to double by next year – are college graduates. Many are former college teachers. Some started out as social workers. Most have some experience in working with community problems.
Mr. Jones, now 33 years old, majored in business administration at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., then became an assistant director of the Cleveland Development Foundation, a group of business leaders interested in city planning. From there he moved into a University of Oklahoma urban renewal study project, then was picked by the state to be its first coordinator of fund raising in the war on poverty. He stayed in that post one year.
While many grantsmen are salaried professionals employed by the group or agency seeking funds, in some cases they have organized research groups to free-lance their services. One is Social Sciences Research & Development Corp., El Cerrito, Calif. With its 14 full-time social scientists plus a clerical and writing staff, the group writes applications for other poverty- fighting agencies and even gets grants itself. Social Sciences Research now is administrating a $15 million Commerce Department study to improve employment conditions in Oakland.
"Given a problem to solve – say juvenile delinquency among seventh grade Negro students – we let all our staff members take a crack at it," says Floyd Hunter, director of Social Sciences Research.. "They figure out what kind of personnel would be needed and what the program should be. Then they decide how much money is needed and what agency in Washington is most likely to provide it."