Thanks to a grant written in a Monroe Community College course, the volunteer Hilton-Parma Fire District (HPFD) will receive $44,500 to upgrade their radios. Without the money, fire officials were without resources to purchase the essential equipment.
HPFD will upgrade the radio in the fire station, mobile radios on the fire trucks, and portable radios carried by the firefighters. The upgrade creates compatibility with Monroe County’s new narrow-band frequency and allows the department to meet the FCC’s required change to that frequency by 2008, says John Lemcke, HPFD fire commissioner.
“The new equipment will improve reception and reliability,” says Lemcke. He adds that the new system will give the fire department the option of communicating with each other and with other departments on several different channels, depending on the size and scope of a fire.
Among 17,000 grant applications submitted to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the HPFD grant received funding through the Federal Fire Act on the second attempt.
Students in MCC’s Public Administration course on grant writing researched, wrote and submitted the grant a couple years ago. As most applications for FEMA grants are rejected on the first submission, the HPFD grant was reworked, after lengthy discussions with FEMA, resubmitted, and approved in December. The fire district will begin buying the new equipment in the next month.
“It does happen,” says Patricia Connelly, MCC adjunct professor, “that grants are highly competitive within some funding sources that it takes several times to get approval. But that’s the nature of grant writing and the reason why a course such as this one is valuable.”
Connelly, who has taught the grant writing course for four years, shows the students the overall process of getting a grant funded – organizing an application, developing statements of need, presenting the nuts and bolts of budgets, writing a clear and convincing argument for the intended use of the money, researching supportive data, checking facts, collaborating with internal colleagues, and networking with external resources.
Students develop grants based on real project needs. “Most of the students’ grant applications have been funded,” she says. “Grant amounts have ranged from several hundred dollars to a hundred thousand.”
A grant written by student Anita Manuele, who works in MCC’s Liberty Partnerships program, recently was awarded $800 through an Arts-in-Education Grant, from the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester, to host an artist for a program on puppetry that teaches cooperation to fourth- and fifth-graders at Rochester City School District, School #52.
Dianne McConkey
Public Affairs
02/18/2004 |