How to Win a Grant (And, How I Got Here)

By Natash Goldman

We start with the WWHWH. Try to pronounce it—I dare you! It’s silly but it works. It stands for “what,” “why,” “how,” “who,” “how much”—the questions that every grant application will ask of applicants. Some applications will bury those questions in one paragraph (hello, US National Endowment of Humanities) while others are very clear and precise (thank you, US National Science Foundation). Still others will ask those questions in myriad ways, repeating them throughout the application and obfuscating them as best as they can (that would be the US Department of Education). But if one can read an RFP and tease out the simple questions of the WWHWH, one is halfway to winning the award.  

Every narrative has a structure. Take film. Innovative narratives take typical narrative structure and blow it apart. For a pop culture example, think of rom-coms, such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding. There will always be certain elements: a couple meets; there is a challenge to overcome; they drift apart; they come together (or stay apart); Windex is involved (or not). But then there are films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (director Michel Gondry; I’m revealing my age). Past, present, and future are all combined within minutes. The characters literally run after their history as it visually disappears before them. But you can’t pull a Gondry on a grant application—the narrative has to be clear and questions must be answered in the order they are asked. The creativity in a grant application comes in the ideas—the activities that will result in the change one wishes to make in the world. The narrative order must be clear. 

My theory seems to work. My company, WISSEN, has brought in close to $40 million in grants for clients from California to Maine. Our work has put thousands of people to work; helped hundreds of students at community colleges get free childcare; provided medical equipment to teach community college students how to become health care workers; highlighted the rich history of humanities production in Maine—and more. Our work helps those in need. WISSEN won the 2024 Small Business Administration Best Home Based Business in Massachusetts award. I wish my parents were around to see it. They wanted me to take business in college (I refused). They were right and I was wrong. But maybe I wasn’t?  

I was always a narrative buff, to be honest. Steven Cohan’s class on narrativity at Syracuse University, my freshman year in college, blew me away. We read Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and Derrida. And you thought deconstruction would get you nowhere?! Now, I own a business. That’s where deconstruction got me. For a while I was on a different path. As an academic for seventeen years, I taught modern and contemporary art history. I wrote a book and articles on Holocaust memorials. Those were stories, too, now that I think about it. But I ended up teaching part time as an adjunct and I was, well, not happy. A serendipitous meeting at the gas pump in Brunswick, Maine, changed my path. “How are you?” an acquaintance asked. “Well, I can’t finish my book, I’m only teaching part time, and I’m basically miserable.” “Come work with my company,” she said, “I think you’d be a great grant writer.” I finished my book and started my business in 2018. And who was with me all the way? Michelle Beckett of PostScript Editing. She edited my academic work and edits my business texts. Thank you, Michelle, for being by my side for . . . a decade??!! I couldn’t have done it without you.  

Natasha Goldman, PhD, is President of WISSEN, Inc. and Visiting Researcher at Boston University. She is a higher education consultant, published scholar, and federal grant winner. She lives and works in Brookline, MA. She earned her doctorate from the University of Rochester (Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, Department of Art and Art History) in 2002. 

Natasha started in the grants world back in the late 80s, during her college years, when she was the grants intern in the Renee Crowne Honors Program at Syracuse University. After college, she chose an academic path, and was a professor for seventeen years, teaching art history and visual culture at a range of institutions, from small, elite, liberal arts colleges to large, public and private universities. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright-Hays, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Carnegie Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the DFG—Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft–Graduiertenkolleg (German Research Association), and the National Endowment of the Humanities. 

She began cutting her teeth with a large corporate grants firm in 2014 and founded WISSEN in 2018. Natasha loves helping clients formulate grant projects and strategize their priorities. Among others, she has won NSF, NEH, DOJ, Fulbright, Dept. of Labor, EDA, and foundation awards for her clients. 

Her book, Memory Passages: Holocaust Memorials in the United States and Germany, was published by Temple University Press (2020). She is a 2018 and 2020 awardee, along with co-director Page Herrlinger, of an NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers on the topic of “Teaching the Holocaust through Visual Culture.”