The Grant Writer's Paradox: Leveraging Public Scholarship Ideas When the Money Is Uncertain

Given the virtually universal need for resources to support public scholarship, collaborative grant writing is critical to most partnership-based research in any discipline. And yet collaborative grant writing is more often seen as an administrative hoop than as a process to facilitate strong projects and partnerships. This article considers grant proposals as a genre of scholarly communication that embodies the opportunities and limitations of advancing meaningful public scholarship within our imperfect system. Collaborative grant writing and the creative dialogues it prompts are presented as pathways to collective flourishing that encourage curiosity, knowledge sharing, and pragmatic discussions about needs and priorities to facilitate authentic, rigorous, and transparent partnerships in tandem with stronger funding applications. The article concludes with core principles for co-crafting grant proposals with partners that strengthen relationships, foster effective projects, and develop compelling narratives for funders. The authors propose that the collaborative grant writing process itself can help facilitate those tough conversations by creating the space and imperative to plan and communicate clearly.