LitNYS Mentoring Program: Bruce Morrow on Fundraising

"There are all these different ways that you need to look at your literary arts program and align it with funders, so that you can get support. Really, it’s what you are already doing."

LitNYS: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you came into fundraising for literary arts nonprofits.

BM: I went into nonprofit work after getting my MFA at Columbia in fiction. Before that, I studied biology and did research at the medical school. My advisor at Columbia said “You should probably find a literary home.” At that time, there was a job at Teachers and Writers Collaborative. I had never heard of the organization before. I got the job. 

The person that I was replacing was a poet. He did proposal writing and mentored me for three months and then for more than a year by email. That’s really how I learned about nonprofit work, fundraising, and grant writing.

LitNYS: What do you think is a common fundraising struggle that people deal with at nonprofits? What would your advice to them be?

BM: People just want to get funded for what they do, and that’s a great idea. Everybody must get funded for what they do. But, in order to get funded for what you do you have to put a different perspective on your work and do that from the funder’s point of view, then you can fund all of the work that you are already doing. You have to do it through that funder’s lens of priorities. 

LitNYS: Can you tell me about your experience as a mentor in the LitNYS program and how you approach mentoring?

BM: I’ve worked with quite a few different groups and I really like to be a mentor and a resource for mentees to further their work. We usually meet 1:1. It could be once a month or once every couple of months. It’s usually a very casual conversation and through that conversation, I can start figuring out a few things that they might want to focus on. 

LitNYS: Can you speak about a time in which you felt how significant mentoring is for an organization?

BM: I think it’s for an individual, which ends up affecting the organization. So many people that go into nonprofits and into fundraising do it from all these different pathways to get there, just like me. They might not know a lot about nonprofit management or strategies for fundraising. They sometimes struggle with what they’re doing and might also be putting their energy in the wrong places, so it’s good to be able to have conversations about what they can focus on. Maybe the focus is about supervising people or being supervised, it could be the structure of the organization, or it could be program development.

LitNYS: You’re known as an expert fundraiser and you’re also a writer. A lot of writers are scared of fundraising. Grant writing can be scary and very technical. As a creative person, can you speak about what you love about fundraising? 

BM: I taught a class on fundraising and led it as a writing workshop. I see grant writing and proposal writing as a form. There are prose forms – essays and different ways of writing and structuring a document or a text. A proposal is pretty much that same thing. What makes it compelling is to be able to write something in less than five or ten pages and then have someone give you $10,000 or a million dollars. This is powerful writing that you are doing. It’s really based on certain kinds of formats and a form as a way to get that project or importance of this work across.

LitNYS: I’m the kind of writer that finds grant writing daunting because it feels like there are constraints, but every form has its constraints. I think that’s the interesting part of writing. It is what you do within that.

BM: Totally. I seldom write poetry but when I do start using poetic forms, working in that technical way, it helps me to make my work more powerful.

LitNYS: You developed the clever acronym “POME,” which is not ironic, based on what you just said. Do you want to give it a description for people who are going to come across this resource?

LitNYS: I taught a class at Bank Street for arts educators. I further developed this thing called “POME” from original work of Patricia (Paddy) Fisher, Kristin Conklin and Susan Arshak. It stands for Problem, Objectives or Outcomes, Methods, and Evaluation. If you have those four elements for any grant proposal, you will increase the strength of the proposal. That’s pretty much the form for a grant proposal. Of course, you can add a budget and other things in there, but if you have those four things, I think you will strengthen your grant proposal.

LitNYS: Is there anything you want to tell the LitNYS community about fundraising?

BM: I have been part of LitNYS for some years now and I really think that literature and creative writing isn’t a big area of funding. It is compelling and there are books, literature and creative writing everywhere, so I think it’s overlooked as an art form in need of funding. People often think it’s all about big publishing, so there’s no need to be supporting literature. 

I think people that are in literature and literary arts organizations should try to align themselves with funding priorities — such as social and emotional learning, for example. There’s so much research that shows that reading and writing is a great way for social and emotional learning, which is a huge funding area. Also, if you have a literary press, then apprenticeships and creating a career pipeline are really great funding issues that foundations and major donors are interested in. 

There are all these different ways that you need to look at your literary arts program and align it with funders, so that you can get support. Really, it’s what you are already doing.