Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
8-2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
English
Major Professor
Jeffrey Ringer
Committee Members
Lisa King, Jessi Grieser, LaToya Eaves
Abstract
In nonprofit contexts, grantwriting is a complex, collaborative, and highly-distributed form of technical writing that is often seen as only accessible to formally-trained, professional grantwriters, and is only studied in relationship to large, well-established nonprofits that can afford to work with such writers. In contrast, this project aims to understand how grassroots nonprofits and their amateur grantwriting teams engage in their own unique grantwriting processes, how relational and missional factors influence that process, and how different contributors to the grant understand their work. This project is made up of three autoethnographic case studies, each about the process of how one successful grant was written at a grassroots nonprofit, combining data from interviews with all contributors to a grant, the final grant texts themselves, and participatory observations of the grantwriting process. Across all of these cases, common findings show that amateur grantwriters at grassroots nonprofits depend on relationships and lived experience to negotiate systemic barriers in the grants ecosystem, and use the grantwriting process to shape and revise their nonprofits’ identities and goals. Such nonprofits encounter many kinds of barriers to receiving funding through the grants system, whether in expectations about data and objectivity, about organizational infrastructure, and even about their own capacity to do this work on a volunteer or over-worked basis. Their creative and subversive practices, termed tactical vernacular grantwriting, allow them to survive and get resources from a system that was not built for them. These findings indicate the need for more expansive understandings of grantwriting, beyond the mere drafting process, to include the full idiosyncratic and highly-contextual collaborative processes found at each nonprofit, and for technical writing teachers to teach grantwriting, particularly community-engaged nonprofit grantwriting, as an ethical and tactical writing process.
Recommended Citation
Sauskojus, Kelly M., "Tactical Vernacular Grantwriting. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2024.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/10501