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Foreword

For the better part of forty years, Harvey Chess has reviewed, parsed, written, edited, shredded, rebuilt and otherwise put his fingerprints on more grant proposals than any other person on this planet. Period. Full stop.

In training sessions in every nonprofit setting imaginable, and in cities large and tiny, Harvey has honed an approach to successful grant writing that often surprises people at first. Harvey doesn't teach fundraising. The nonprofit landscape is littered with expensive books and training sessions claiming, usually unsuccessfully, to do that. Harvey's clear-headed approach is to help us understand and articulate how and why our projects and organizations benefit a constituency. Armed with this, the nonprofit can approach a funding source as a potential partner: how the funding source with its money and the nonprofit organization with its expertise can form a partnership to alleviate a problem. Harvey Chess has tested this philanthropic partnership thousands of times, and it works.

I first met Harvey Chess when we both were trainers with the Grantsmanship Center in Los Angeles. Harvey was seldom in Los Angeles, however; he loved being in the field: Bangor, Maine; Elmira, New York; Window Rock, Arizona, and Juneau, Alaska, to name a few stops. Over the years, Harvey captivated his participants and me with his logic, his street savvy, his humor and his eloquent (occasionally grandiloquent) turn of phrase. Later in our careers, I was lucky enough to have Harvey as one of my senior program officers at the California Community Foundation in Los Angeles. There he spent almost a decade providing millions of dollars in project grants.

The book you are holding contains a no-nonsense and easily-understood method of attracting assets to your nonprofit organization. It will make you laugh and more importantly, it will make you think. You are in for a treat.

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