Post Holiday Blues

The rest of the University seems to be on vacation, so I've been in a relatively quiet office for the few weeks. It's nice to not have distractions, but its lonely, too.

I told myself I'd take the time to catch up on the projects that I never seem to have time to do, like writing field reports. What it's turned into is a lot of grant writing, to try and get a program up and off the ground. The program should be amazing. Its a program to teach high school aged youth to make and distribute short documentary films.

I hate grant writing. Its tedious and I always worry that I'm doing it wrong. It feels awkward writing praise about myself and my organization. Looking at descriptions of the programming, I think "Is our work really that cool? Do all those buzzwords really describe us?" Its not that I don't think my organization does good work. We do awesome work. But I don't like finding grants and then trying to make it sound like we do what the grants want.

To build capacity, I think what my org needs most is another staff person. Someone to do purely administrative and fiscal business. Its much easier to find volunteers to teach and run programs than it is to find volunteers to organize and keep track of files.