I received my first grant for $500 in 1992, my second year teaching, to connect my South Central Los Angeles 5th graders from Main Street Elementary to the Internet and to use my AOL account to share and exchange video footage of my students with a school in Vassalboro, Maine. I received a $3,000 grant in 1994, my fourth year teaching, but it wasn’t until 1999, my eighth year teaching, when I received two grants for $10,000 each, that I started what became a streak.
From 1999 to 2022 I received at least one grant per year, every year. Going by school years, 1999-2000 to 2022-2023, that became a 24 year grant streak! In 2012, I thought my grant streak had ended after 13 straight years but luckily, I found some new grant opportunities and kept my streak alive!
All together, in my first 32 years teaching I have received 51 grants totaling over $378,442. My streak may be over, but I’m far from done writing grants. Grants are an amazing way to provide materials and experiences for students that school budgets alone may never provide. And they are quite easy to get if you are willing to put in the work once you design a great project.
I’ve shared my grant proposals and my strategies here for anyone wanting to seek additional funding for their programs or projects.
So to those of you on a grant writing journey or starting out on a grant writing journey, I wish you good luck because it’s worth it.
I’ve been trying out MidJourney and thought I’d put some images on this post. The prompt I used to get those two above images was: “Educational grants for 6th grade projects focusing on Science and environmental stewardship.“
At first, I tried the following prompt and was not happy with the results (shown below): “Educational grants received by a teacher for environmental science projects for 6th grade students.“
