A collaborative approach to grant seeking can stimulate and reshape the culture of your library organization. The exciting and rewarding activities of developing a successful grants program can yield enormous dividends for the benefit of your staff, patrons, and community. Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A Practical Guide for Librarians will share new insights for those who want to access grant funding without reinventing the wheel. Based on years of practical grant writing and collaboration development experience, this resource provides a complete guide for setting up a library grant-seeking program, and for combining forces with community partners to increase grant funding to libraries. Venturing into the grants world can be scary and unpredictable. This book offers detailed strategies and practical steps to establish a supportive and collaborative environment that creates the capacity to consistently develop fundable proposals, and gives readers the confidence needed to make grant-seeking activities commonplace within libraries. Collaborative Grant-Seeking will share featured topics unavailable in other grant writing publications, such as: *interpreting sponsor guidelines *identifying appropriate funding programs *determining the feasibility of project ideas *asset-based (vs. need-based) proposal development strategies *actual examples of successful and unusual library projects *initiating and sustaining collaborative relationships

A collaborative approach to grant seeking can stimulate and reshape the culture of your library organization. The exciting and rewarding activities of developing a successful grants program can yield enormous dividends for the benefit of your staff, patrons, and community. Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A Practical Guide for Librarians will share new insights for those who want to access grant funding without reinventing the wheel. Based on years of practical grant writing and collaboration development experience, this resource provides a complete guide for setting up a library grant-seeking program, and for combining forces with community partners to increase grant funding to libraries. Venturing into the grants world can be scary and unpredictable. This book offers detailed strategies and practical steps to establish a supportive and collaborative environment that creates the capacity to consistently develop fundable proposals, and gives readers the confidence needed to make grant-seeking activities commonplace within libraries. Collaborative Grant Seeking will share featured topics unavailable in other grant writing publications, such as: *interpreting sponsor guidelines *identifying appropriate funding programs *determining the feasibility of project ideas *asset-based (vs. need-based) proposal development strategies *actual examples of successful and unusual library projects *initiating and sustaining collaborative relationships

Interaction with strangers cultivates creativity and provides opportunities for joining forces to achieve great ends. However most people tend to avoid talking or working with people they do not know, whether in the library, a classroom, or in academic and nonprofit settings. And to do so is to short-circuit much of the creative potential that is so necessary for innovation, and that organizational stakeholders crave. Enter CoLAB. Developed and presented by de Farber at workshops across the country, and used by the authors to successfully spur collaboration at the University of Florida (including faculty-librarian, librarian-librarian, librarian-student, faculty-faculty, student-student, and student-librarian-community member), it showcases the power of face-to-face conversations. Leading readers through a unique framework that breaks down barriers to collaboration while also kindling long-lasting enthusiasm, this manual includes: testimonials from workshop participants that demonstrate the benefits of a Collaborating with Strangers workshop; step by step guidance on every aspect of organizing and presenting a CoLAB workshop; helpful photographs and diagrams that show prep and workshops in action; ready to use surveys for assessment before and after the workshop; grant proposal development techniques for bringing two or more organizations together on a project; pointers on how to adapt the workshop for ice-breakers, conference programs, or classrooms; and samples of workshop promotion pieces that can be adapted as needed. Libraries have always connected patrons to resources and information; this resource shows how, through successful group collaboration, organizations can extend that connection to include the talents and assets of community members.