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FUNDING YOUR PHOTO PROJECTS

ADVICE FROM FUNDRAISING EXPERTS ⚫ LANDING MULTI-SOURCE FUNDING ⚫ HOW TO WIN GRANTS TO SUPPORT YOUR PROJECTS ⚫ WRITING GRANT PROPOSALS

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Tips for fundraising, soliciting donations and applying for grants.

ILLUSTRATION BY SHARON BER FOR PDN

FRACTURED ATLAS is a non-profit company providing online business tools and fundraising support for artists and arts organizations. In 2016, Dianne Debicella, then the company’s senior program director for fiscal sponsorship (she now works for Community Partners, a fiscal sponsor in Los Angeles), shared practical advice for photographers about soliciting donations and applying for grants.

PDN: How does the Fractured Atlas fiscal sponsorship program work?DIANNE DEBICELLA: It’s a fundraising program that enables either an individual or an organization to use some of the benefits of Fractured Atlas’s non-profit

status. If an individual artist is asking friends and family to donate, or they want to do a crowd-funding campaign, we issue tax receipts to their donors (so their donations are tax deductible). That’s an incentive for people to give. Or if they want to apply for a grant that only a non-profit can apply for, they can apply through us.

PDN: What do you charge for the service?DD: Individual membership to Fractured Atlas is $10 per month, and for organizations it’s $20 per month. That gives you access not only to the fiscal sponsorship program, but to all of our other products and services. When you are fiscally sponsored, we charge a 7 percent fee on all the donations processed through us.

PDN: How else do you help artists raise money?DD: We don’t do the fundraising for them, but we try to teach individuals how to fundraise. We provide webinars each week on different topics to help people get started. We review the materials artists create for solicitation, including

individual appeal letters and grant applications. We help people figure out which grants are a good fit. With crowd-funding initiatives, we make sure the ask amount is appropriate, the project description is clear, and the video is good.

PDN: What kinds of things do you have teach artists in the webinars?DD: We offer webinars on about ten different topics. They’re free to the public. There’s one on how to cultivate individual donors, there’s another on how to expand your donor network, and another on how to ask for donations that addresses questions such as: What do you

say? How many times do you approach [potential donors]? PDN: What advice do you give photographers about cultivating donors?DD: Start with people close to you. Form a small advisory group of people who are passionate about your work, and ask them: Who do you know that you can introduce to my work? Another method is to think on a daily, active basis about who you are meeting, and how they can either be an audience member or a donor. Have your elevator pitch ready to go so you can say within 30 seconds: “This is who I am, this is what I’m working on, this is how you can be involved if you’re interested.”

PDN: How do you ask for money? What do you say?DD: A lot of artists who come to us say, “I feel weird asking people for money. I feel like I’m begging.” Within the arts/charitable sector, people are used to being asked for money.

You have to frame [the pitch] with confidence and clarity: “This is exactly what I’m doing, and this is why you should be involved. So I’m offering you this

ADVICE FROM A FUNDRAISING EXPERT ABOUT SOLICITING DONATIONS AND APPLYING FOR GRANTS The senior program director for a fiscal sponsor offers her advice for photographers about finding financial support for their work. INTERVIEW BY DAVID WALKER

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PDN’S FUNDING YOUR PHOTO PROJECTS

Dianne Debicella.

DIANNE DEBICELLA

“WE DON’T DO THE

FUNDRAISING FOR THEM,

BUT WE TRY TO TEACH

INDIVIDUALS HOW TO

FUNDRAISE.”

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opportunity.” This isn’t about begging, and this isn’t about handouts. This is about [asking people to] become part of your project and support it, and about you not coming across as, “I’m sorry to bother you, and this is something I feel embarrassed by.” Nobody’s going to want to give if you’re acting shy about it, or if you’re acting as if you’re doing something wrong. You might not necessarily make the ask in person, but you’re trying to seed a network in order to prep [potential donors] by saying, “I’m going to be doing this project, and I’d love to send you more information about it.” Or you might say, “I’m really excited about this work that I’m producing. Can I share some of it with you?” That gives you an introduction, and the ability to make that ask down the road.

PDN: How do you figure out how much to ask for?DD: If you’re sending out a request by email or snail mail, and you are uncomfortable saying, “Please give me $1,000,” you can say, “If you donate $25, it will help me buy five rolls of film. If you donate $50, that will pay for one hour of darkroom time. If you donate $250, that is going to help me pay for a lighting kit rental.” Share that with [potential donors] so they can see exactly what they’re going to be paying for. That gives them an idea of how much you need. You can also say, “My budget for this project is

$10,000, and to date, I’ve raised $1,500. Will you help me get the rest of the way there by helping with these specific needs of the project?” You don’t have to come out and say, “Give me $250,” but give them options. You may have some idea of what you think they can afford, so make sure those levels [of options] are appropriate for them.

PDN: What are some common fundraising mistakes photographers make, besides being apologetic about asking for money?DD: A lot of photographers want to apply for all the grants they can find, instead of finding grant opportunities that are a good fit for them. That is a big mistake. Funders have specific priorities and guidelines. So you have to make sure your work is a good fit for the grant, and you have to make the case for why you’re qualified. We recommend that people start searching for grant opportunities by

looking at the Foundation Center, a library with the most comprehensive database of grants in the U.S. It’s a pretty powerful tool for searching for grants.

PDN: How do you search it for grants that are a good match for your work?DD: If you go to one of the Foundation Centers, their staff will teach you how to use the database. If you’re not based in a city with a Foundation Center location, there are about 550 libraries and schools that can give you access [to the Foundation Center database] for free. You can also access the database online. [Editor’s note: limited database access online is free, but full access costs $50 per month.]

You can search by geographic areas, discipline areas, and types of support. You can end up with a list of 100 grants. But that’s when you have to look at [the grant funders’] websites. Look at their tax returns. Who have they funded in the past? Is it work similar to yours? How much did they give? Is it similar to what you would ask for? Did they give to an organization or individual that’s similar in size to yours? Those are questions we tell people to ask [to determine if a grant is a good fit].

DIANNE DEBICELLA

“NOBODY’S GOING TO

WANT TO GIVE IF YOU’RE

ACTING SHY ABOUT IT,

OR IF YOU’RE ACTING AS IF

YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING

WRONG.”

SEE MORE STORIES ABOUT GRANTS AND FUNDING AT PDNONLINE.COM/BUSINESS-MARKETING/ PHOTO-GRANTS-FUNDING/

hotographer and filmmaker David Rochkind’s photos

of the tuberculosis crisis on three continents form the foundation of tbepidemic.org, an educational website he created. He funded the project with support from a journalism organization, a public-private philanthropy created by a pharmaceutical company and an anti-poverty advocacy group. His goal for the website was to engage high school students in “an educational story about one of our most pressing public health issues,” he says. Each funder backed different aspects of the multi-year project: the production of the photos, curriculum development and an educational packet. Rochkind landed each funder through targeted proposals that spoke to their mission. “It’s important to look at the goals that potential partners have, and to ask myself, ‘What value would they see in the pictures?’”

Rochkind is now seeking funding for a traveling museum exhibition about the global fight against TB. He says he is applying some of the lessons he has learned about how to cover all his

expenses, as well as his time and the cost of outreach needed to bring his work to the right audiences.

Rochkind first began researching TB in 2007. While he was working on an application for a grant to cover public health issues, a source suggested he look into TB among migrant workers in South Africa’s gold mines. “I didn’t realize it is such a huge issue, that it kills over a million people a year

worldwide, or that it had such a huge societal impact,” he recalls. He ended up winning a grant from the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University, and spent six weeks photographing in South Africa.

While there, he says, “I was struck that it wasn’t just a health issue. It was impacting people in a variety of ways.” The disease is treatable, but it requires daily dosing for close to a year. Sporadic or

unfinished treatment leads to drug resistant TB, which is harder to treat. When a parent or breadwinner has to decide between going to work and getting treatment, TB can have devastating consequences for a whole family. Rochkind, who has covered social justice issues for years, wanted to know more.

In 2009, he submitted the South Africa work to a contest run by the Stop TB Partnership, and won a

LANDING MULTI-SOURCE FUNDING: CORPORATIONS, PHILANTHROPIES AND NGOS Filmmaker David Rochkind explains how he landed multiple sources to support his project, including private companies, nonprofit journalism organizations and more. BY HOLLY STUART HUGHES


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A nurse at the Phom Ngac Thach hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, the main TB hospital in the south of Vietnam, checks on a patient. David Rochkind has photographed the TB epidemic in four countries, with support from a variety of sources.

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grant to complete a reporting trip. He decided to spend six weeks in India, another country with a high rate of TB, and to focus on the urban slums of Mumbai, in contrast to his work in rural areas of South Africa. “I was thinking about how to build a body of work—not just a single story or two stories, but looking at the global issue.” Like the IRP grant, the Stop TB Partnership award was a few thousand dollars—enough to cover most of his travel expenses, but little else.

“Once you get the expenses paid for, you don’t have your time paid for, and it’s really hard to sell those images to news outlets,” Rochkind notes. Few news publications are interested in covering global health, poverty or development,

and his coverage of a long-standing crisis lacked a news hook. “I’d approach editors who would say, ‘What’s the story?’ and I’d say, ‘Well it’s TB in South Africa.’ And they’d say, ‘Great, but what’s the story?’”

He got the work published on World TB Day, but Rochkind felt frustrated: “It gets reduced to an eight-picture slide show of what can really be pictures of people dying of any disease in a far off country. It could be any disease—HIV, malaria.”

He wanted to find a way for viewers to spend more time with the photos and captions, and allow them to learn more about the societal impact of the disease. He decided to build a website, and use it as part of an educational curriculum. “I’m

not an advocate or a teacher, but it is my goal to have the work I do move people, teach people and inspire people,” he says. He began looking for funding partners, and started by approaching organizations that had a stake in raising awareness about TB.

One of the funders of the Stop TB Partnership Award was the Lilly MDR-TB Partnership, a consortium of private companies, nonprofit health organizations and academic institutions started and led by pharmaceutical

giant Eli Lilly and Company. He sent them a proposal to fund the creation of an educational website using his photos. “The idea of creating a curriculum about TB that could be shared with high schools was interesting to them,” Rochkind says. They

agreed to fund the hiring of a web designer and curriculum development experts, but first, Rochkind needed to get more images and expand his coverage.

He decided to go to Moldova, to cover the rise of drug-resistant TB, particularly in the country’s prisons. To fund that trip, he turned to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The nonprofit journalism organization had previously supported Rochkind’s coverage of the drug wars in Mexico, and also arranged for him to show the work at high schools, universities, journalism and photography conferences. “I wasn’t looking for them to fund the creation of the website or the curriculum,” Rochkind says. “They were interested, but I knew the mission of their organization wasn’t the funding of educational websites. They fund journalism, then get it into schools.”

Nathalie Applewhite, managing director of the Pulitzer Center, says, “David is a great example of the kind of journalist who is committed to an issue beyond just the placement in media.” She says the Pulitzer Center favors applicants who propose a plan for distributing the work once it’s completed, and Rochkind’s plan for working with a funder to build a curriculum fit their mission. “We see education work as a critical extension of the work we support. This is a tough topic to get students interested in but this was such a strong

A woman lies on the floor with her mother and son in a slum in Mumbai, where she moved to be closer to a TB treatment center.

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project, we thought it had a lot of potential.”

In addition to funding Rochkind’s trip to Moldova—and a recent trip to document TB treatment in Vietnam—the Pulitzer Center also agreed to act as Rochkind’s fiscal sponsor: The Lilly MDR-TB Partnership paid the Pulitzer Center, which in turn paid the bills for the curriculum developer Rochkind hired.

Says Applewhite, “We’ve done this on a couple of projects, where a foundation can’t give grants to an individual.” She adds, “We do that very, very selectively, because we are accountable.” The Pulitzer Center administered the funds, after carefully reviewing the Partnership’s contract with Rochkind, with particular attention to the contract’s language regarding image usage. “There were no red flags,” she says. “There wasn’t any attempt at editorial control” by Lilly MDR-TB.

Rochkind says that when he writes proposals for funding, “I like to say, ‘This is what I’m doing and I’d like you to support it,’ to try to maintain editorial control.”

He says that in searching for funders, “What’s been most useful is being involved in the issue—speaking on the issue, being invited to health conferences and being invited to speak on panels.” His role as a speaker demonstrated his expertise, and inspired trust, and the conferences helped him learn about the challenges faced by organizations fighting TB and what they need. “You understand how your work can have value to them and

learn if there are opportunities to work together.”

In writing his proposals, he follows the format of grant applications. They always include a “statement of need”— and an explanation of how his photo-based curriculum could solve a problem, such as a lack of awareness of TB or a prevailing attitude that the disease is hopeless. “Understand the problem that your funder has that can be solved by engaging, emotive visual media,” he advises.

Education Development Center (EDC), a nonprofit, set up the lesson plans and teachers’ guides on the tbepidemic.org website with feedback from Rochkind. Rochkind says the teaching tool provides “a really interesting way to get viewers to think about pictures in a new way.” Rochkind also wanted to include a call to action on the site, and Results, an advocacy organization, provided a downloadable “action packet” it has created for social service advocacy groups. It includes information on how to conduct letter writing campaigns, how to hold fundraisers, and other tips for spurring action by policy makers and legislators.

Rochkind regrets that in his funding proposals he failed to budget enough to cover outreach. “It’s not enough to create this and hope the world notices,” he says. Marketing the work to teachers can be expensive, but in hindsight, he says, “I would have included money in the grant proposal

specifically for outreach and implementation: teaching schools how to use it, pitching it to schools.”

His proposal to fund the curriculum project included a fee for his work supervising the site’s development, but for the most part, he says, “I put more time into this project than I was paid for.” He is currently soliciting funders for support to turn the work into an interactive, traveling museum exhibition. As he writes his pitches, he says, “One thing I’m doing differently now is valuing my time more.”

As he continues documenting the TB epidemic, he has few regrets about how tbepidemic.org came together. “The reality is, this is a dream for me: To have this work used in this way by organizations working to achieve tangible results.”

TO READ ABOUT ANOTHER LONG-TERM FUNDING PROJECT, SEE PDNONLINE.COM/BUSINESS-MARKETING/PHOTO-GRANTS-FUNDING/LANDING-MULTI-SOURCE-FUNDING-LONG-TERM-PROJECTS/

DAVID ROCHKIND

“WHAT’S BEEN MOST USEFUL IS

BEING INVOLVED IN THE ISSUE—

SPEAKING ON THE ISSUE,

BEING INVITED TO HEALTH

CONFERENCES AND BEING INVITED TO

SPEAK ON PANELS.”

SARA TERRY, photographer founder of the Aftermath Project and a professional grant writer, estimates she has won grants totaling nearly $1 million over the last 15 years. PDN asked her for her practical tips and advice for successful grant writing.

PDN: Are there good resources for identifying available grants for photographers?Sara Terry: Every once in a while you see someone post a list of available grants. You can Google “grants available for photographers” and one of those lists will pop up. I just discovered the Ernest Cole Award in South Africa that way.

PDN: Do you follow any kind of roadmap when applying for grants? Can you break it down into manageable steps?ST: Number one, research the grant you think you want to apply for. Carefully read the website and the FAQ page. Look at who has won it before. Read very carefully the application questions, and figure out what they want to fund. Is it a year-long grant? Are they giving you cues that there’s a specific hook to this grant? That’s where you start.

Then you need to understand what makes your project different, and what

makes it worthy. What do you think is going to grab somebody’s attention about it? It could be that nobody has done it. It could be a historically overlooked issue. You may have a personal connection to it. I’m thinking of Jessica Hines, who has been a finalist for the Aftermath Grant. Her work is about her brother, who was a Vietnam vet who committed suicide.

If you’re not a good writer, give yourself a week to write the heart of your application—your statement—and then share it and get feedback on it. I think the next step would be to select the photos that you want to support it, and then have people check that edit for you. That’s the order I would do it in.

PDN: How do you determine if a grant is a good fit for the work you do?ST: You have to understand that a grant has a specific purpose, mission or intent. You need to read carefully what the mission statement is. Aftermath Project has a mission in documenting post-conflict stories, and an outcome—a book. I make those things clear, but I get applications every year from people who propose environmental aftermath stories, or from people who

try to twist the meaning of conflict to fit their own agenda, for instance, [saying] domestic violence is post-conflict. I guarantee you any funder with a specific mission statement will look at that and disqualify it.

PDN: What are other common reasons applicants get disqualified or rejected?ST: I think a lot of people have never had anyone take a critical look at their work and say, “You are not up to par here.”

A really important thing to do is go back in and look at what [the grant sponsor has] already funded. With the [Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize], it looked like an unwritten rule that if a national project won, you wouldn’t win with a national project the following year [because] for many years, the awards went national, international, national, international.

With Aftermath Project, we’re not going to give a $20,000 grant for the same project that won the previous year. We have a limited landscape, and limited finances, and we’re trying to draw a big picture. So if last year’s winner was Stanley Greene on Chechnya, we won’t give another grant for a project on Chechnya.

PDN: When you’re trying to figure out what projects an organization wants to fund, what other cues do you look for?ST: I got [The Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship Award] for work in Bosnia in 2005, I think. I read the Alicia Patterson guidelines. They so clearly stated they wanted to support production of journalism stories, so that’s what I wrote, and I won. It was the wording I used to make sure I was meeting their interest. You have to incorporate it so you’re not just parroting what they want. It takes some thinking, and maybe talking to someone who has won the grant before, if you know somebody.

There are little tricks. The Guggenheim Foundation doesn’t tell you why you won, but they want to feel like they’re supporting you at a pivotal point in your career, and almost all the writing I’ve seen for Guggenheim fellowships reflected a measure of confidence on the part of the photographers—a sense of self-awareness, and why the work mattered. There was Robert Frank’s legendary one-pager [application].

Sometimes people pitch [projects on grant applications] as a photojournalism assignment, but you look at that and go, “You could get that done in a month. And you want a grant for a year?” It’s not going to happen.

PDN: It sounds like you can look at past winners of different grants, and reverse engineer the winning applications?ST: It’s something you can do. You would look for patterns of what’s been awarded,

GRANT WRITER SARA TERRY ON HOW TO WIN GRANTS TO SUPPORT YOUR PROJECTS Photographer Sara Terry, founder of the Aftermath Project and a professional grant writer, shares some tips and advice for successful grant writing. INTERVIEW BY DAVID WALKER


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and look at what they’ve funded in recent years. With Guggenheim, you can look up who’s won, and try to find their project work online. And you can maybe look for what the photographer has written about that work, and how they’ve framed it, to give you a sense of their individual thinking. You’re never going to see a Guggenheim grant application [online because] it’s very private. We do publish the [application] statements that come in with our winning grants [for Aftermath Project], so you can see how grant winners and finalists framed their stories. But you’ve got to learn as much as you can, and then you have to free yourself from thinking you have to copy anybody, because that won’t work.

PDN: What tips do you have for writing the grant application?ST: If you’re not a good writer, I think it’s really important to find a friend who is a good writer—preferably a journalist. Your project statement should have, fairly high up, a succinct sense of what it is you want to do and why it matters. If you’re a really good writer, you can probably get people to wander with you for three or four paragraphs, before you get to [what you want to do and why it matters.] But if it sounds like a college history assignment, and you talk about the history of the civil war in Sri Lanka, you’ve wasted half of your up-front pitch talking about the past, and not about what you’re going

to do. In the end, the photos and the written statement are equal. You’re not going to get through with strong photos and a lousy proposal.

PDN: Do have any other tips for writing that proposal?ST: I think one of the best tips ever given to me as a writer was: If you have just been to an event, or if something just happened, and you picked up the phone and called your grandmother, what’s the first thing you would tell her about what you just saw? You’re not writing for Congressmen or bankers. You want to be able to communicate in a clear and dynamic way to someone you care about. That’s an amazing writing tip, in terms of keeping it conversational, intelligible, dynamic and human.

PDN: That applies to grant-writing, too?ST: Yeah, you don’t want to quote a Doctors Without Borders report for the first couple of paragraphs. You might cite reports and statistics. But a really well-written, successful grant application—at least for the types of grants we’re talking about—just has a compelling conversational quality to it. Not an academic quality.

The other thing that gets noticed is whether your story is unusual. Every year I write a letter saying [to potential applicants], “This is what’s interesting to us this year.” And at the end, before the grant is announced, I write a letter to all of the applicants with notes about how the judging went, so they get a

general sense of things that worked or didn’t work.

PDN: What’s an example of something you said?ST: It’s so interesting how trends develop. Like right now, that whole object-as-storytelling thing that Glenna Gordon did so beautifully with objects [that kidnap victims] brought back from captivity, and with her project called Abducted Nigerian School Girls; all of the sudden everybody’s [photographing] objects [as stories]. That’s going to become like beating a dead horse pretty soon. There was a period of time [three or four years ago] when everybody tried to tell news stories through portraits. And I would write to people and say, we had so many proposals [for that type of story], and they just weren’t strong enough.

PDN: We so often hear from jurors that people try to imitate what won previously.ST: Somebody gets recognized, and immediately

everybody adopts that style. Know what’s been awarded, but don’t copy it, because that’s really boring. Amplify it or go do something new.

PDN: Can you solicit feedback if you don’t win? Can you call afterwards?ST: If they say do not call, DO NOT call. They’ve said they don’t want to hear from you.

PDN: What if you know a juror? Is it kosher to ask where you fell short, or how your application could have been better?ST: Not really. It depends. At Aftermath Project, we don’t have the manpower for feedback. You don’t have headspace for 180 applications in your mind. None of my friends have ever asked why they didn’t get that Aftermath grant. They respect those boundaries. But we don’t prohibit judges from talking to applicants. You might ask a juror if you know them. But if the funder says no feedback, that’s it.

I would make a really important point: If an applicant is fortunate to have communication from grantor, like a feedback note, like, “You’re not framing it in a way that fits our goals,” you want to be respectful and appreciative. You do not want to argue with the grantor about what it is they’re doing, or how they see the issue that they are funding. You snap to and be appreciative that someone tried to give you a helping hand. [Don’t] get defensive and argumentative.

SARA TERRY, AFTERMATH PROJECT

“IF YOU’RE NOT A GOOD

WRITER, I THINK

IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT

TO FIND A FRIEND WHO

IS A GOOD WRITER—

PREFERABLY A JOURNALIST.”

IN A RECENT ARTICLE on successful grant-writing, photographer Mary F. Calvert credits a change in the way she wrote grant applications to reading Stephanie Sinclair’s winning project proposal for the 2008 Alexia Foundation Professional Grant. Sinclair’s proposal “was personal and conversational about a specific person,” Calvert recalls. Sinclair sought Alexia funding to continue her work on girls as young as 8 who are forced into marriage. In her application, she described meeting Marzia, a girl in Afghanistan who was married at 8 and set herself on fire at 15 to avoid facing her husband’s wrath over a broken television. Sinclair also talked about Jamila, 15, a mother of two, whose

husband stabbed her several times because she visited her mother without his permission. “I want people to hear their haunting stories in their own small voices,” Sinclair wrote in her proposal.

Sinclair used the grant to photograph in India. Since then, she has launched the nonprofit Too Young to Wed to advocate for an end to child marriage. She has brought the issue to the forefront of policy discussions on gender inequality, human rights and international development.

By the time she applied for the Alexia grant, Sinclair had photographed child brides in Nepal, Afghanistan and Ethiopia with funding from the nonprofit 50 Crows and assignments from Geo and The New York Times Magazine. But she was still new to grant-writing. “Because I wasn’t an experienced grant writer, I felt what I wanted to convey is what I’d seen in the field,” she explains. She believed that if the grant judges heard the girls’ stories, they would want to help. She adds, “It’s a matter of sharing what you experience, and [communicating] why this is important journalistically. I really felt that this was an

important topic that was underreported.” She notes that photographers are often distracted by logistics or how to market a story. “You forget how much your affection and care can be evident in your photos, and that’s such an important element of getting other people to care.”

To make an impact, Sinclair partnered with several organizations. She created an exhibition that toured 25 countries with support from the International Center for Research on Women, the UN Population Fund and the Canadian government. Her work was shown at the United Nations and the U.S. Capitol. Some countries have banned child marriage, but the practice continues. More work needs to be done to recognize that girls have value, Sinclair says. She continues to push the issue.

In December 2016, she and three other photographers taught the second of two photo workshops in Kenya for girls rescued from marriage.

The goal is for the girls to use photos of their lives to share their stories and help others. “We want them to go through their lives believing that their voice counts and that they can make a difference,” Sinclair says. “I have spent almost 15 years photographing girls after something traumatic has happened to them. To see them turn around and take their power back blows my mind. I’m so proud of them.”

STEPHANIE SINCLAIR ON WRITING GRANT PROPOSALS WITH PERSONAL APPEAL Sinclair won the Alexia Foundation Professional Grant with a heart-felt, conversational proposal. It changed the way Mary F. Calvert writes grants. BY HOLLY STUART HUGHES


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TO SEE MARY F. CALVERT'S STORY ON GRANT WRITTING AT GO TO PDNONLINE.COM/PHOTO-GRANTS-FUNDING/ 3-PHOTOGRAPHERS-ON-THE-SECRETS-OF-SUCCESSFUL- GRANT-WRITING-MARY-F-CALVERT/

Mary F. Calvert. STEPHANIE SINCLAIR

“YOU FORGET HOW MUCH YOUR

AFFECTION AND CARE CAN BE

EVIDENT IN YOUR PHOTOS, AND THAT’S SUCH

AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF

GETTING OTHER PEOPLE TO CARE.”

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