Help - We do we need a professional grant writer?

We got this great question from a wonderful team in Ohio:

We recently were notified of a missing WWI marker found in a basement of an old city building and our post along with the Historical Society and the city administration want to get it refurbished and get a place for it to be displayed. We need the $2000 grant badly as our post only has 18 members and we have minimal money.

We can raise the basic $2000 for the matching grant. That is no problem. The problem is writing the grant as we do not have a grant writer nor the expertise to do so.

by Commander VFW post -Ohio

Here is the answer to this really important question... And we want to share this with all of you!

Please don't let the grant application scare you.

It's not that formal. In fact the question is a really good one.
Most of what we are asking you to submit in the application is really for you and not for us.

By the time you lay out the information we are asking for, you will have thought through your project the way you should, in order to pull it off successfully.

Please don't think of our grant application process as a road block. We WANT to give you the money because we WANT you to restore the memorial. We trying to help you succeed in your project. I know a grant application sounds like a formal thing that specialists do… but we really know and understand that all the folks who are going to be taking on these restoration and conservation service projects are FOLKS not grant specialists.

Take a look at the competition briefing video [Link to the video here] at around 8:45 - it explains what you'll need to include:

There is some information we need, a letter from the memorial owners and two documents

INFORMATION: We need to know basic info -where the project is, who owns it, the team name who's taking the project on.
Letter: We also ask for a confirmation letter from the memorial owners / managers confirming that your team is authorized to do the project, We have a sample confirmation letter for you use as a template: [Link to download the sample confirmation letter or find it in RESOURCES on the 100C/100M site > downloads]

DOCUMENT 1  Then we ask you to submit a project plan. In fact we posted a document that outlines what you need to include: [Link to download the PDF or find it in RESOURCES on the 100C/100M site > downloads]
The most important reason for this document is to help you plan. If you can fill in the outline - it's a good bet you will have thought through the basics of what you are getting yourself into.
We want you to succeed and we want to help you to think through it. It's not such a big deal - it's an outline of what your planning to do, how you plan on doing it, what you think it's gonna cost, how you think your gonna raise the core funds. Things like that. These are thing you need to be clear on anyway and the documents makes a great check list. There are no points given or lost on making it fancy. We just want to help you line up all the pieces.

DOCUMENT 2 Last but not least - and probably a lot of fun, is a section called: Our Memorial, Our Community and Our Project - This is the part that we will publish on the national website, use for showing project profiles, and that you can use to tell the world about your memorial and your project. You can have pictures, videos (got an iPhone?), sound or just a nice explanation - but you still want pictures. In the case of the question above - showing the plaque that you found and the shape it's in, the place you want to put it, and what you plan on doing should make a great story.

Keep sending in those great questions. We are here to help and we will share key questions with the others interested in the program.

The 100 Cities / 100 Memorials project team.