Where to Find Grants: Part 2—Grant Wrangler
Grant Wrangler (www.grantwrangler.com) is a great site to frequent if you are looking for funding to be used for a school-based program, because the site is aimed at providing information on grants for K-12 schools in a user-friendly format.
This database is relatively new—initiated in 2006 or 2007. It’s come a long way in a short time, though, and provides a very nice listing of grants for many topics of interest to schools, including a more recently added categorical search for “Health and Physical Education (PE).” The categories by which you can search are fairly unique and do not adhere to the standard federal topic areas used by most databases. The upside to this is significantly greater flexibility for searches. The categories include academic topic areas, expiration month (deadline month), school level (such as Middle School), and many other topics, as well, like “Professional Development” and even “Home School.” You can also do a key word search or a calendar-based search. The entries found in response to your search will be summarized in two to four lines with links to more information. The links take you to summaries that include the grant program name, deadline, funding source/funder, program website link, and brief program overview.
The grant summaries on this site provide less information than is provided by some other databases, but the information is of fairly good quality, and the succinct format allows for faster “skimming” for the grants that seem best suited to the applicant’s needs. For an experienced grant researcher familiar with most programs out there, this is a handy time-saver because the researcher is typically just looking for a “reminder” of what’s out there and can easily dig deeper for information on the grants that are most ideal. For an individual new to grants research, the short format used on this site is less overwhelming than more extensive summaries may be. Since the program website link is also provided, the researcher can easily click for more details on any grant of interest.
Grant Wrangler has a few other handy tools, as well. For example, the grant summaries also include “Discuss this Grant” links that allow you to participate in an online discussion on the grant topic area. The discussion links will take you to an area where you have an additional top tool bar that allows access to a wealth of other resources, including blogs, a member community, and links to videos and other sites. Grant Wrangler also sends out a bi-weekly email bulletin highlighting a handful of key time-relevant opportunities. You can sign up for this right on the site by clicking on the “Subscribe bulletin” link on the left side tool bar on the Grant Wrangler homepage or any of the summary pages.
As with the RAC database, Grant Wrangler is entirely FREE. If you haven’t already guessed, our focus for this series on where to find grants information is free resources! :o) There are several more resources on our list, but we welcome your comments and notes about your favorite places to find grant information at no cost.
