How would £98,000 change your life? I will tell you how it changed mine.
So seven years ago I had just moved up from the role of a gender program coordinator in one of the fastest growing NGOs in my region to a program manager.
One of my core deliverable was resource mobilization, specifically fundraising through grantwriting, and also handling correspondence, documentations and due diligence assessments with donors.
I felt I had a hang of things because I had trained and worked in a business school where I was in charge of business development so I just thought, Oh, I will just breeze through it.I got the shock of my life.
Over and over again, my proposals kept getting rejected. In fact, most of the time, donors didn’t even respond, there was no feedback on whether the proposal was accepted or rejected, it was all crickets.
Some of the proposals didn’t even get to leave the organization, my Executive Director practically could not submit some of the proposals. It was a very low point of my life. One thing I’m grateful for is the strong will to always find a way out of my low point.
Guess what, I bent down and started a series of research. I spent hours, weeks even were pregnant with my second child, I spent hours late into the night, studying, reading, bingeing on training videos.
When it was as if I wasn’t getting the kind of results I wanted, I signed up for courses with the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa virtually to learn the theory of change and results based project management. And that was the turning point of my life.
I get all fired up when it comes to executing strategies, and that is one thing that has really given me the kind of results that I have today.I kept implementing all of the lessons, invested in a lot of resources to ensure that I understood the principle and practice behind program development and fund raising.
So where does the £98,000 come in all of this?, that is the value of the first successful grant, I had ever written in my life after so many failures and that was a turning point for my career.This is one source of inspiration that keeps me moving, looking at where I came from and how I clinched the £98,000 project approval from a UK funding agency.
So, what will that figure do for you. This figure plays a key role in my brand because it opened me up to what is possible. A horizon of endless possibilities. If you’re willing to pay the price to learn, implement, and make progress, the possibilities are endless.
I shared this personal story just to inspire you that the possibilities are endless if you would just take a chance on yourself.No matter how low you think things are, give yourself a chance.