r/grants

[Not sure where folks are in the world… this is directed at grant application writers who work for nonprofits in the United States]

Looking to chat with anyone who has experience with writing applications for this program. If my org got this grant, it would be institution changing. Our buildings don’t even have a camera system and it’s in a busy downtown area.

I recently secured fiscal sponsorship through the Alliance of Women Directors for my narrative fiction feature. When I was first looking into the process, everyone talked about how fiscal sponsorship opens the door to funding and grants that only non-profits are eligible for.

I'm having a lot of trouble actually finding those specific grants, though. Most of the ones I'm seeing are just general independent film grants that anyone can apply to anyway.

For context, this is a female-written and directed narrative feature about dementia and caregiving, and I'm based in California. I know there has to be targeted funding out there, but I'm hitting a wall finding the non-profit-exclusive ones.

For those of you who have had your films fiscally sponsored, what specific non-profit-only grants did you actually apply to? I’d love to hear about your experiences and where you found them.

Thanks!

I am an tenure-track assistant professor working in computational biology, and I've been fairly lucky with grants. I just got back the reviewer's comments for my grant this year, and I am now convinced that a grant reviewer is really unqualified to review grants with any statistics. (The other reviewer gave me perfect scores across the board, and I only had two reviewers this year.)

I proposed a new Bayesian model for modelling genomic data, and he raised three "fatal flaws" with my model:

1. p(theta) = 1 doesn't make sense.
2. p(x | theta) = Binomial( x | x + y, theta) is wrong because x is a random variable and it cannot be a distributional parameter.
3. hyperparameters should be fixed.

For reference, the simplified version of my model is:

Given read counts x_j (alternative) and y_j (reference) at a locus j, we estimate theta \in (0, 1) under the model:

p(x_j | theta) = Binomial( x_j | x_j + y_j, theta), p(theta) = 1

(I've probably oversimplied the model. It is now, of course, just the standard binomial model familiar to most computational biolgists. The real model quite a bit more complicated/novel...)

Point 1. p(theta) = 1 is valid for my model, because theta is in (0, 1). When you integrate p(theta) = 1 from 0 to 1, you get 1, which means this probability density function (pdf) integrates to 1 over the support of the pdf. Further, since p(theta) = 1 >= 0 for all theta, this function satisfy the non-negativity constraint. Therefore, p(theta) = 1 is a proper pdf for my model. The properties of a pdf is routinely taught in any introductory course in mathematical statistics... not sure why the reviewer is calling this a "fatal flaw." (Yes, in Bayesian statistics, you would often see p(theta) \propto 1 instead when theta is a real number, which is not the case here.)

Point 2. Under the binomial distribution, the total count is fixed. Here, x + y is clearly the total count, and it is of course fixed. x is a random variable, y is a random variable, but x + y is fixed. This is the standard assumption for the binomial distribution taught in introductory statistics.

Point 3. The vast majority of hyperparameters in Bayesian models are fixed. Most papers assume that you know that the hyperparmeter is fixed, unless specified otherwise. Really not sure why this is a "fatal flaw". My grant is read by biologists as well, and I didn't want to use the word "fixed", which most people don't understand.

This reviewer has been reviewing my grants every year, and he (or she) usually give mediocre scores (I guess experts in "Bayesian statistics" are harder to find). All other reviewers seem to be computational biologists in different subfields. This year, this person is particularly critical, and the panel member really took this person's comments to heart. Last year, I showed preliminary data that convincingly showed that my other statistical model works, and this reviewer said he don't believe me because the data is better than anything he's ever seen and accused me of not explaining why my model works. I wrote half a page on the key trick of my model (accounting for measurement error), and even dedicated a whole figure panel to illustrating the novel approach. This reviewer somehow missed all of this. Luckily, the panel member ignored him last year. This year, I wasn't so lucky.

I don't know who this reviewer is, and I am not sure whether this reviewer has beef against me. He seems to know some basic Bayesian concepts, like priors and hyperparameters, but he is also making basic math mistakes and wrongly accusing me of being confused and my models of being fatally flawed, based on his poor understanding of basic mathematical concepts.

So, what strategies would you use to exclude an unqualified reviewer from reviewing your grant?

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Additional context: For this particular grant agency, grants are always sent to people overseas (to avoid conflict of interest). And the reviewers are *paid*. What multiple former members that served on the review panel noticed is that reviewers from developing countries have an unusually high rate of accepting a request to review a grant (presumably due to the financial incentives). So, unqualified reviewers have a financial incentive to review grants for the agency, even when they have no business reviewing the grants. I suppose one way of appearing like an expert is to be hypercritical.

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When I was in the US, I also had my K99 application reviewed by a "Bayesian expert" who really is just a former physicist who dabbled with some Bayesian statistics, and he seems to think a determinantal point process prior is "basic" stuff. It wasn't that hard to guess who the reviewer was, since he was the only person on the K99 special study section who had anything to do with "Bayesian statistics."

Maybe I should stop putting down "Bayesian statistics" as a keyword on my grants?

Place where to seek grants or micro loans for small business.

I've been working on my home for about a year and a half and its gotten exorbitantly expensive, with every process to solve one issue revealing another. I'm trying to find ways to fund the final push to get it to a point where its safe, up to code, and energy efficient.

Hello, there's still time to submit your questions to the live, free, online MSCA Q&A session we're doing next week.

Register to attend, submit questions, and access the recording afterwards if you can make it to the live session! Here's the link: www.fundingproposalsecrets.com/home-msca.

We'll choose the best questions to go online and answer on writing the rest.

The event will take place on Thursday July 2nd at 6 PM CEST, and the deadline to submit questions is this Friday June 26.

It will be conducted by a former MSCA recipient and a former ERC evaluator (myself).

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and please help us spread the word!

Paulius