Winning Grants: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians with Multimedia Tutorials and Grant Development Tools

Winning Grants: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians with Multimedia Tutorials and Grant Development Tools

by Pamela MacKellar and Stephanie Gerding

MacKellar, Pamela H. and Stephanie K. Gerding. Winning Grants: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians with Multimedia Tutorials and Grant Development Tools. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2010.

Grants play an important role in enabling non-profit organizations like libraries to fulfill their missions. As a result, the grant application process is an inevitable part of almost every librarian’s job. Grants are necessary to help supplement the budget for special projects, programs, operating costs… the list is endless. Winning Grants by Pamela H. MacKellar and Stephanie K. Gerding is an excellent tool for librarians or non-profit organizations who are learning how to write grants or need to improve their basic skills.

Winning Grants specifically helps librarians because the focus is on library grant work and the use of strategic planning and goal-setting as the groundwork of grant work. This helps to streamline the work and to ensure that your efforts directly benefit the library’s larger mission and vision while also meeting the needs of the community. With the focus specifically on library grants, the reader is able to extract information that is directed to meet his or her specific needs in the library setting rather than a more generalized approach that has to meet the necessities of a range of non-profit groups.

In addition to describing the grant process in great detail, the authors also provide “Library Grant Success Stories” that give the reader the opportunity to see how other libraries have succeeded in obtaining funding for different grants. It gives examples of the successful application as a guideline to follow for future applications. The one major issue with the book is that all of the examples are American so there are few examples of grants that are available in Canada.

When you purchase the book, it comes with a DVD that contains different templates to help the grant writer get started with the application. Although the templates seem simple at first glance, they ensure that the writer considers all aspects of the grant before it is submitted.

A copy of Winning Grants by Pamela H. MacKellar and Stephanie K. Gerding should be available for staff use in every library for reference. If someone has a difficult time starting to write a grant, this book will guide them through the process and increase their chance at submitting a successful application.