Message to Heritage Network Members on thinking about grants:
After almost a full month of weekly history presentations to the Colville Chamber, the Heritage Network Annual Meeting and the Horizons Grant Writing Workshop by Susan Howlett, we are about to hear that the City of Colville and Stevens County are proclaiming May, History Month.
The Grant workshop was an epiphany for me. I have been looking at the tasks ahead and wondering how we as a group would find the time to volunteer for over $20,000 worth of in kind labor to even qualify for a grant from Preserver America. I got into this after all because we are all so tapped out already.
After the workshop, I realized that I am acting as a representative for Stevens County in preparing a request for research into information that the county needs to preserve, organize, interpret and leverage its heritage into a mental and economic asset for the whole county. Your part would be as contractors to the county, which would in effect be your biggest client. I don't really expect you to personally volunteer for anything. I want you to tell me how much it will cost me to have you inventory your materials under the topics of "Crossroads on the Columbia" and how many hours of access to those materials, the county should expect to pay for while it digitizes them and passes them on to technicians to build a digital archive of county history that we can all use.
I'll need to get some more official forms together to estimate these individual contracts. In places where you want to oversee or participate in the research work, the grant should pay for that work. If you don't have the time, we need to find people in the greater community who do. We should be able to accommodate contributions of labor at all skill levels and develop pledges of labor, materials and equipment from the community to meet those needs to the greatest extent possible with or without Preserve America grant money. In-kind contributions of labor etc. done before the period of the grant do not count in the match, so we are looking for pledges and estimates right now.
The bigger variety of companies, clubs, churches etc. that we can show as participants, the better chance we have of garnering a grant. So for instance, my time right now is not necessarily from Joe Barreca the Heritage Network member, but from Map Metrics, the company looking for some recognition and tax right-offs.
I'll have more to say about this as we move on, but for now I want you all to think in terms of what history you can contribute to the county given some time and money.