It’s All about the Budget

These past few weeks, I have spent a lot of hours staring at an Excel sheet.  But this is a good thing- when I was still pondering a major during my time in college, I eventually chose to double major with economics because I missed numbers and math so much.  I am simultaneously helping to manage three budgets across different programs, and I feel lucky to gain some substantial experience in grant writing.

First, as I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently preparing for a project with AIESEC Prilep, my organization, called Leadership Inspirational Seminar.  The goal of this seminar is to help students from this area connect with employers (through a career fair on April 2) and to learn some soft skills and tactics to improve their pre-professional skills (through a seminar hosted on April 3-4).  However, in order to make this seminar possible, our organization needed money.  And that is where the Small Projects Assistance grant came in.

Better known as a SPA grant, these grants are provided by USAID and are only available to Peace Corps volunteers.  The maximum amount granted for a certain project is $4,000, but community contribution must comprise of at least 25% of the total budget.  Additionally, these grants are focused on skills transfers, so the projects must contain some type of training (thus, purchasing supplies for an office or fixing a road or buying a gaggle of geese are not the best uses of SPA funds).

My organization and I put together our application for the SPA grant in December and submitted it before the new year.  The main goal of the project is to reduce the youth unemployment rate, which is very high in Macedonia (official statistics puts the unemployment rate at 28%, and it is much higher for the youth).  A high graduation rate from tertiary education and lack of opportunities is driving many young Macedonians to leave the country, sapping Macedonia of talent. 

I expected the application for the SPA grant to be especially grueling.  One of my former sitemates was a champion for SPA before she COSed, and she would recount stories of how she sent the drafts back to her assigned PCVs many times before they were allowed to submit them for review.  Of course, there is a very limited amount of funds provided for SPA each year, so competition for the funds among PCVs can be very fierce.  I braced myself for the ordeal I would go through to secure funding for LIS.

Overall, my expectations of the SPA process were a bit heightened.  The process turned out to be much easier than I thought.  My champion only asked me to edit my Needs Assessment and Application a few times, and our proposal for funds was granted within the first round.  The PC staff that heads the committee for SPA even commended after the funds were allocated what a great project she thought LIS was (though I cannot take any credit for that, it was the brainchild of my counterparts). 

There are a few reasons why this process was much easier than I thought.  First (as I just mentioned), the idea for the project was developed by the AIESEC members, and the project is largely being managed by them.  Second, I had a great champion who worked with grant writing in the past, so her advice undoubtedly enhanced our application.  Additionally, the amount we requested was under $1000, and our community contribution neared 50% of the project.  Finally, our project is pure skills transfer and sustainable for years to come, which are two essential elements for recipients of SPA funds.  Implementation of the project is now under way, and we will see in less than two weeks if the project is a success or not.

In addition to the SPA grant for LIS, I have also been putting together an application for a US Embassy grant for our YMLP and the GLOW summer camps.  Working together with GLOW’s finance coordinator, we have been shooting Excel spreadsheets back and forth of budgets for both camps, taking into account lodging, food, transportation, materials, personnel, etc.  Even though the majority of the funds will be provided through corporate sponsorship from local companies, additional funds were needed from the grant to plug what we could not gather from sponsors. 

Devising a budget and writing the narrative for it seemed a daunting task, especially since the narrative for the grant that support YMLP three years ago was 38 pages long.  However, the US Embassy revised its application process, limiting the characters for each section.  Thus, putting together the application mostly entailed hashing together descriptions for both camps, and fine-tuning them to devise a readable narrative regarding the benefits of these camps.  Just recently, many of the YMLP representatives met over Skype to comb through the grant and narrative line per line, and our fingers are crossed for approval of funds.  Even though different versions of Excel spreadsheets were flying around, never once was working with this budget stressful for me.  In fact, I enjoyed the challenge greatly.

The last budget that I worked with is a bit more of a mess, but nonetheless helped me to solidify my confidence with working with budgets and fundraising.  The other secondary project with which I work is the Macedonian Model UN.  Even though I am technically the Communications Chair, the grant application that was originally submitted to the US Embassy to support the next year of the program had been turned down.  Thus, about a month ago we were scrambling to find a creative solution to fund this year’s conference.  One idea was using Peace Corps’ other grant opportunity, a PCPP grant (pretty much a crowd sourcing grant).  However, having PC two grants open simultaneously is not allowed, so that meant that we were required to pursue a more mainstream crowd sourcing option.

Thus, in a short amount of time, I had to learn about Indiegogo, how an international organization can apply for funds through it, how it can establish a PayPal account, and what charges would be taken from the crowd-sourced funds.  I laid out this plan to the organization with which we work, and we were all but ready to start with the process of opening our crowdsourcing campaign.  Then… we hit radio silence.  And eventually we received word that the US Embassy asked the organization to submit a new, reduced grant budget and application.  So, we are back to square one, and we all hope that the funds will come through and all will end happily.

Working on three finance projects simultaneously has been quite an experience, and even though I am somewhat new to it, it was an experience that I was determined to have during my time in PC.  Working with grants, budgets, and fundraising has been much more fun than I originally thought, and I hope I will be able to work in a similar capacity in the future.