Startups are always hard. But if you don’t pursue your dreams, you’ll never know if it stand the chance to be successful. Dreams are all we have. Take them seriously.

Quite often, if you want to receive grants and funding, you will be asked to submit a grant proposal. How you structure it will depend upon what the grant funder requires and your own decisions on what’s best. Each request for proposals is unique, with varying degrees of how creative you can be. As usual, though, we’re going to follow our rule of doing exactly what the grant provider asks of you, to maximize your chances for grants and funding. To the extent you can, you should make your grant proposal tell a story.

We all know the feeling of coming thisclose to getting something, then finding out that we just barely missed out. This can be true with grant funding. Many grant programs are funded at a particular time of year, then end when all the funds are allocated. Others have a pre-determined funding cycle. If you miss this funding cycle, you end up having to wait until the next one, or if the program isn’t renewed, then you miss out altogether.

Many people have a preconceived notion that grant writing is difficult and get intimidated at the thought of completing a grant application. With your busy life, who has time to figure it out? To save you time, here are the top ten tips for writing successful grant applications.

We’ve all heard about how having a college or university education can be intellectually fulfilling and, in most cases, helps you increase your lifetime earnings. Certain degrees, such as medicine or engineering, are considered to be tickets to a middle to upper-middle class economic bracket. Other degrees, such as art degree or some liberal arts studies have less of a solid connection between the degree and future earning power,

YouthBuild grants totaling $76M available to help at-risk youth
complete education, develop job and leadership skills. The program helps young people who left school early to complete high school or state equivalency degree programs, and learn critical job skills in demand in the construction, health care, information technology and other industries.

Youth in Canada will now have more opportunity thanks to a new private sector alliance between a group of independent Canadian business owners and Pomeroy Equitable Solutions LLC (PES), a US-based company that created the youth funding movement Swipe4TheKids.

Swipe4TheKids is a sustainable funding source for youth enrichment programs. Made possible by partnerships between businesses, their customers, and merchant services partner Eclypse Solutions, Swipe4TheKids allows vital programs to flourish and provides long-term benefits.

The Needs Assessment is a crucial part of your grant proposal because that’s where you make the case that there’s a legitimate reason that you’re asking for grant money. As I often point out, grant money exists to bridge the gap between a need and a solution (or at least to lessen the need that exists). The job of the person writing the grant proposal is to explain that a need really does exist and provide evidence of it.

Forty teams of graduate and undergraduate students from across the country are each receiving a $15,000 government grant for research proposals that develop solutions to real-world water and environmental challenges. The government grant funding, provided through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) Phase I grants, was recently announced by the Agency.

“The P3 program offers a unique opportunity for students to develop and showcase innovative designs for environmental solutions,” said Lek Kadeli, principal deputy assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “As we enter the 10th year of the government grant program, the ingenuity and passion of the students continue to provide solutions that protect health and the environment while spurring economic development.”

This guide provides detailed insights and resources on the following topics and more:

• Cyberattacks
• Business continuity
• Making a disaster recovery plan
• Determining your greatest risk potential
• Additional steps to take to protect your business

There’s been some severe weather in the United States in the past couple of months, and billions of dollars of damage has been one result. Even if you’re not in one of the hard-hit areas, it’s worthwhile for you to be prepared with the resources that you’ll need if a natural disaster happens close to home.

With U.S. consumers increasingly interested in organic farming, the small businesswoman today has many opportunities to capitalize. Organic farming provides a niche that most large farms cannot fill, and a wealth of help in the form of grants makes launching into an organic farming business relatively simple for any woman. Available grants run the gamut, but they fall into a few main categories.

More than 200 at-risk young Vermonters will find summer employment thanks to a federal grant program, with the focus on those who are no longer in school.

The Vermont Department of Labor has awarded grants totaling $100,000 to eight organizations from Burlington to Bennington. They will use the money to offer education and on-the-job training to Vermonters ages 16 to 24, with training in a broad array of fields ranging from early childhood development to forestry. One official said, “We’re trying to create independent citizens who have the skills needed to get a job and have a career and be a success at it.”

It might seem as though grant proposals are pretty cut-and-dried, without much latitude for how you express your ideas. This may seem especially true in the case of government grants, which have pretty definite and no-nonsense guidelines. I’ve written in more than one previous article that it’s important and necessary to adhere to the guidelines, or else risk disqualification.

Who wouldn’t want to open their mailbox and find a government grant check, payable to you, waiting there? The bigger question is whether you can get sufficiently motivated to assess your situation, make plans, learn what you need to, and take steps to do what it takes to get that government grant. (If you’re already my student, you know that I get you a hand with many of those.)

If you’re an American who pays taxes, at tax time and throughout the year, you need to be aware of what may trigger audits from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). First, though, be aware that in general, your chances of being audited are only about 1.5% if you’re just an average taxpayer. There are, however, some so-called “red flags” that may increase the odds that you’ll be picked for an audit.

How do you think a grant reviewer will see your proposal? Try putting yourself mentally in the place of the reviewer, keeping in mind that he or she has no emotional attachment to your idea, nor any prior background knowledge of why your project would be a good one.Here, we get some hints and insights from professional grant reviewers about what their preferences and pet peeves are (adapted from research by Purdue University).

Do you know what happens to areas where there’s an economic decline? One bleak scenario is that without money, it starts to become dilapidated and possibly crime-ridden, so that just accelerates the pace of businesses and residents leaving the area. Revenues decline further because of the shrinking tax base, and the downward spiral continues. One way to prevent this is with an infusion of outside funding. One way a town or neighborhood can get a boost is with money from the federal government. One of the longest-running and most successful federal grant programs is the Community Development Block Grant. Here’s how it works. A sum of money in the form of a federal grant is provided