| Sources: Winning Library Grants: A Game Plan | |
| Susan Hopwood | |
| Susan Hopwood, Outreach Librarian, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin | |
Herbert B. Landau is director of the Lancaster Public Library in Pennsylvania and previous director of the Milanof-Schock Library in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, which was named the Library Journal “Best Small Library in America” in 2006. He also is author of the The Small Public Library Survival Guide (ALA, 2008). The premise of Winning Library Grants is that current economic times and tight budgets make fundraising more important than ever. The slim guide might be called a primer for novices. In 15 chapters, Landau takes the librarian or library trustee through all of the fundamentals: identifying local foundations, initiating contact with grantors, writing proposals, and initiating outcome-based evaluation methodologies. The guide contains good sample materials, such as a letter of inquiry, a proposal, a budget, and a grant timeline.
The book contains a six-page list of resources that causes the reader to wonder, “Do we need another basic book on fundraising?” Every major publisher that caters to the library profession has issued such a guide; for instance, a recent addition to the genre is Getting the Money: How to Succeed in Fundraising for Public and Nonprofit Libraries (Libraries Unlimited, 2009). ALA's Big Book of Library Grant Money (2007) is not really a comparison because it is a directory profiling more than 2,300 foundations nationwide, rather than a guidebook. Landau wades into topics that are somewhat advanced (federal government grants) or not entirely appropriate for beginners (requests for proposals). He also fails to devote sufficient space to the free and useful resources available in hundreds of Foundation Center Cooperating Collections nationwide (for information about these, see http://foundationcenter.org/collections). For most public libraries, the logical first organizations of interest will be community and state private and corporate foundations; the book would be more helpful to beginners if it pointed out that most states have a directory of state foundations and that the Foundation Center has many leads on identifying local funders. A new free source for beginners is ALA's new “Frontline Fundraising Toolkit,” which covers all the basics for starting a fundraising plan.
The bottom line: Landau has created an adequate resource for a library that has never investigated how to begin the grant-seeking process. The book, together with the many free sites offered by the Foundation Center and ALA, should enable a librarian to form a plan and execute a successful search for new funds.
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