From Grants to Greatness: Renee Bourque's Journey in Philanthropy

Keith Haney: 00:01:03

My guest today is Renee Burke, one of North America's leading grant strategists. But her journey began far from boardrooms and academic halls.

After years of teaching and securing major research grants at University of Washington, Renee made a life changing decision. She joined her mother in working in post war Guatemala where she had life changing opportunities.

Spent 15 years rebuilding communities side by side with nearly blind and elderly mother. Living through civil conflict, Renee saw both destruction and hope.

That experience changed how she sees the power of funding not just as an idea, but in real people's lives. Since then she's helped secure over 600 million globally and wrote best selling book grant funded now in the seventh edition.

Renee brings not only expertise but a deep humanity to the world of philanthropy and social impact. We're honored to welcome her to the show. Welcome Renee.

Renee Bourke: 00:02:02

Thank you so much for having me today. I can't wait to talk about funding and the kinds of people who raise funds to do good in the world.

Keith Haney: 00:02:12

Looking forward to. It's an important conversation so I'm looking forward to this with you as well. I'm gonna start out with my favorite question.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Renee Bourke: 00:02:23

It's going to be an unexpected piece of advice that came from growing up with my mountaineer father is something called the rest step. And it's something that you do when you climb a mountain. It's where you take a step and then you rest and then you take another step and you rest.

And you do this all the way up the mountain.

And by really pacing yourself, you can do hard things and then you can get to unexpected places with beautiful vistas and you can do this with other people.

And this pacing yourself to do really hard things that you couldn't imagine is a really great way to orient yourself to just getting started and then getting really settled in to the climb.

Keith Haney: 00:03:14

Here's the second person to try to talk me into climbing a mountain. I had another guest who said one of her things she did was went up a mountain with her husband and is like, you really should try that.

I'm like, yeah, no, I'll leave that to more adventurous people than myself.

Renee Bourke: 00:03:31

It's a mentality. It's a mentality of resiliency and deciding to do hard things and then doing them with other people.

And I think the nonprofit world and the world of people who come together in faith to do things is full of people with that mentality, the people who don't give up.

Keith Haney: 00:03:54

I love that. I'm always curious. I look at Your journey.

And I'm curious, as you think about the impact you're having now and impact you've had before is who are some people on your journey who served as a mentor or an inspiration for you along the way?

Renee Bourke: 00:04:10

Well, I've of course had several, many. One was my grandmother, who was really amazing.

She lived through the depression, she lived through World War I, World War II, she had polio, and she was widowed at 44.

And in spite of all that, or because of all that, she became a very resilient, strong woman who learned a lot of skills for working with others, for saving, for becoming an entrepreneur, but then living very humbly and by doing this. And she was also an elementary school teacher and she took the proceeds from her entrepreneurism and became a philanthropist.

And then that gave me an opportunity to become a philanthropist in my life.

Keith Haney: 00:05:09

That's so great.

Renee Bourke: 00:05:09

And also to live, to learn how to live humbly and to give generously of time and talent through a life experience, which I think is really the way to be, is to not really give over into consumerism, but to really live your life through living with others.

Keith Haney: 00:05:33

I always think that us spending time in other cultures really helps shape who we are and even shape the mission that we have. How did your time in post war Guatemala shape your understanding of funding and what we can truly do to make a difference in the world?

Renee Bourke: 00:05:49

So the work in Guatemala is truly amazing because this is a community similar to other communities that I've worked in.

For instance in East Africa, in Colombia, and other communities where these are areas where the government has somewhat abandoned these areas because of the conflicts. There is a lot of strife, not a lot of infrastructure.

And so then it's really up to the people who are there to figure out how to come forward and work together and put what resources they have together.

And I'm very interested in these areas because people really have to make a decision to rise above their situation and then understand what they have. They have their hard work, they have their ability to work together and really understand what resources are available to them.

And then natural leaders will come out of that situation. And then so then as a philanthropist, you really want to nurture those kinds of leaders.

And that's the kind of work that I want to do both as supporting financially and supporting with mentoring, supporting with networks, support, supporting with what we call venture philanthropy.

So really providing a kind of consulting practice around emergent leaders so that they can rise up and provide their own solutions to their own communities, which is far better than someone from the Outside coming in and supposing that they know what's best for a local situation.

Keith Haney: 00:07:54

I'm glad you mentioned it, because I'm curious.

When you, when you work in areas that we're not, it's not our home base and that we don't have to live, that we don't live there when we go, how do you make sure that the helping we do is something like you, I love. You talk about training other training leaders who will basically take over and help lead in an area.

How do you balance helping to the point where you don't hinder the work you're doing, but you have raising up people to kind of take it on after you leave?

Renee Bourke: 00:08:25

That's right. So we're very careful to take an educator's stance. So we are very careful to sort of require a lot from the communities that we've worked in.

We don't go in and provide everything that they need. The communities have to provide a lot. And then we come in and provide something that's going to bring them up. I'll give you an example.

Monday, we launched a new digital library in an area that has no Internet and had no school.

Part of our strategy is that a school that's been abandoned because of the war, by law, if it has a water system and it has desks and some other things, the government has to provide a teacher. And so we go in and with conversations with the community, understand what is the community going to provide in some cases going to be.

They will, they will replace the roof and some other elements of rehabilitation of the abandoned school.

And then we might work with a rotary to bring, to bring in elements of a water project to restart the water, and then will provide the desks and computers, something called a rachel, which is like an offline equipment that is like the Internet, but can operate without satellite or actual Internet connection. And then we bring these things online and then the government has to provide a teacher.

And then, voila, we have a school back online for an abandoned community. And this is like magic. And then once that school is back online, it becomes like a community center.

Once that school is going, we can start an entrepreneur center there because people are coalescing, things are happening.

And through the digital library, then we can train adults to do all kinds of things through their phones because these transponders will emit for two football fields. So it goes well beyond the school and all kinds of things become possible because we've created like a hub for the community.

And it all starts with bringing together a lot of A lot of people around the vision that starts with the community willingness and what they're willing to put in, what we're willing to put in and what kind of partners we can bring to it.

Keith Haney: 00:11:33

Oh, I love that. That's really an innovative way of doing it.

So you have more people involved, you have ownership, local, local leaders there and you're raising up something that's important for the community. I love that.

Renee Bourke: 00:11:45

Yes, yes. And then, you know what's, what's the, there's this momentum. Some of the things that we've added to the school is greenhouses.

And through the greenhouses they not only have food security, then we're, through the Rachels, we're able to patch into university based climate change research. And the children are participating in climate change research and they're very interested and they feel important in doing this. They feel connected.

And then from a food security aspect, they get to take home the food that they're growing. And the mothers are very encouraged for their kids to go to school, stay in school all day long.

And the kids who maybe are a little bit bored with school love to do the work in the greenhouse. And so it all works together.

Having the women's entrepreneur centers at the schools, then they keep the mothers close to the action and they're getting to learn and kind of be a part of the whole educational process. And then you start a very intergenerational uplift of a community.

And this is what we believe is the solution is a multigenerational approach to a community rising. This is very different from other philanthropists who will maybe write a project check. Right?

We're going to fund a check for a year and not fund an organization or whatever. They take a very short term view.

We take a generational view of a whole context and then look at how can we bring in the different elements with the community needing to provide quite a bit of the effort of what they can of their means so that we can all rise it up, raise that barn.

And then once they get good competency in running it and they're invested in it, then we, like a good teacher, we just back away as they gain competency and confidence.

Keith Haney: 00:14:11

I love that it's generational change. I love how that you've set that up so that the entire community is part of this project. Not just.

It's not that it reminds me of the book When Helping Hurts.

It's like this is not that model where you drop a check and then you leave, but you're, you're kind of staying There working with this whole process with them.

Renee Bourke: 00:14:32

Right. And. And it's. It's real capacity building. So another example is it was illegal for women to have bank accounts until fairly recently in Guatemala.

Keith Haney: 00:14:45

Wow.

Renee Bourke: 00:14:46

And so as part of what we've been doing, we. We've founded some different nonprofits there. But in one of them, the original nonprofit had all male board.

But our goal, of course, was to have women on the board. And over time, it's all women on the board and all women running the finance.

And as part of that, it's been training them on how to do the finance, how to run the numbers and then how to open the bank accounts and how to run the bank accounts. And it's been a real education. But what happens with that education? They take it home.

They take that finance education home, they teach other women, they raise each other up, and then they become role models for the next generation of women. And this is not us waiting for the government or for. For someone else to do it for us.

We're doing it ourselves, which we teach one group, and then they immediately go out and teach others. And that's the model that works. It's not checks and run with us.

Keith Haney: 00:16:08

I love that. Let's talk about your book. You wrote a book called Getting Funded. It's now in a seventh edition and is used across universities and nonprofits.

And you wrote originally, how has it evolved over time? In the seventh writing, you've had to make some changes. So how has it changed?

Renee Bourke: 00:16:26

I love this question because. So Getting Funded has been around for many years. The very first edition was written by Mary hall at Portland State University.

And, and I came in during the fourth edition, and it still had in it that if you wanted to find a funder, you should look in the phone book. So it's changed a lot in this current edition, of course, it has a new chapter on AI and how to use it and how to not use it, what it's.

And specifically what it's good for, how funders are thinking about it, which is really important because what I see is that there are a lot of companies that are creating AI tools for grant writing, but funders are thinking about it very differently, and there are a lot of cautions around using it. Right. So I really encourage people to read that chapter.

Another thing is that because I come from an academic background, I spent nine months talking to people who represent different parts of the nonprofit and academic sectors about what they were experiencing now and what I could help them them with in the new edition. And the two Things that they really talked about were unrestricted funds or flexible funds and overhead funding, the operation of a nonprofit.

So I went to work pretty much start to finish in the book, talking about how to design your organization and your programs, your projects, to create that space, that operational space, and also to make your operations more nimble for when there is a change in funding priorities, which is, of course, what we're seeing galore right now, right? There's a big shift in funding priorities with the federal government and people are having to pivot.

So I was thinking about this two years ago when I started working on the new edition.

And this book helps you create those changes so that you can pivot and position for growth during the upswing, which is there's always funding cycles, even when we aren't in a time like right now, that there's always funding cycles. And so you want to position for growth, position for the upswing, and you can do that with the new edition.

Also, there's a lot more information about funder relationships, about the funder perspective. Because I've spent my whole career as a grant maker in different capacities and participated in the philanthropy community and been a grant seeker.

I put, put in a lot about what is it that, what is the work world like for a funder and what can grant seekers do to make their life easier, and why is that important for relationship building, for trust building, for partnership building? If, if you make it really easy for them, they're going to keep working with you. That's just human nature. So.

Or how do you, how do you build a relationship with a funder in the first place? And how do you keep it good, and how do you, how do you really stay in touch?

What are the different ways that you do that and how are the different funders different? It's all explained in there.

And there is a saying in philanthropy, if you know one funder, you know one funder, you can't generalize one funder across all the funders. So all of these differences are explained in the new edition, and some of it is very technical. To help you with your.

Your communications, there's a new section called Value Statements and Formulas.

So these are ways to describe, in a very detailed way, the value that you deliver so that a program officer can literally cut and paste out those little sections and put it in their reports, put it in all of their different communications, so that when they go to their meetings with the other program officers and they have their wrestling match over who's going to get funded out of a certain funding round. They have the most compelling information to win for your project. Things like that.

Keith Haney: 00:21:54

That's great.

Renee Bourke: 00:21:55

Lots of really practical information.

Keith Haney: 00:21:57

I am curious. I know people listening to, especially nonprofits who are always trying to find funding.

I'd love to ask you what's the most common misconception or mistake that that people seeking funding, especially maybe nonprofits, make when they're looking for grants?

Renee Bourke: 00:22:14

Well, the biggest, simplest one is that people don't follow the directions.

There's like a very, you know, standard rule of thumb that like, 70% of people get thrown out of the pool because they didn't follow the directions which funders have to have because they have to be fair. So if the guidelines say that there's 20 pages in a proposal and you send in 23, well, you don't get to be in that round or something like that.

Right. So that's just like, right off the top. And then another is the fit.

All the time, funders are getting proposals and approaches from people and projects that clearly don't fit their guidelines, and they're just getting sort of the scattershot approach. And so that's to save everybody time. That's the first thing is like, are we a fit? Do we have the same values, the same goals?

Those things are readily findable. So when you knock off some of these, like, they're kind of easy things, really, then you're, like, getting closer and closer to competitive.

And then I would say the other really important thing is that funders are looking for good projects. They're looking for good people, people they can believe in and trust, and they want to be excited.

And so that's why it's so important for us to have our ducks in a row and good projects and good governance and excitement and good stories and get out there and find our right partners, because there are partnerships waiting for us if we will come together.

Keith Haney: 00:24:28

We always hear that there is a large pool of people who love to give money away. I'm not sure how true that is. But if you can't go to the phone book anymore, what do you suggest people do in order to find those right fits?

Because it sounds like you got to do some homework. So how do you begin doing your homework to find the people that fit the projects you're trying to do?

Renee Bourke: 00:24:51

Yeah, well, it's really various right now.

So a really interesting way, I think, that's been around for a long time is that it used to be called the foundation center, but now it's called Candid. It's a research service that's subscription that you can get for free in many libraries across the nation.

And part of why I like that is that there are trained librarians that you can make an appointment with and sit down if you know nothing about prospect research. And they will talk to you and get you going on it and get you started. I love that.

And so you can look up which of your local libraries is a candid library. And then they also have many tools just online, candid.org and then there's other companies like Instrumentl and Grantstation, lots of things.

Some people are even having some success Liquid ChatGPT. But again, those tools, you know, are still developing, let's put it that way.

And then I'd like to emphasize the importance of again, relationships and humans because networking is still really important because the relationship building, maintaining a piece of philanthropy is still the centerpiece of how things get done. Trust is really central. So.

And then I would also suggest that partnering with a more experienced organization to really see how do they do things, what can I learn? Get some mentorship, get some door opening is another way to get started, to get rolling. Yeah. And then another.

There's one more good trick, one more good trick is to find another organization that's like yours in a similar geography and look up their annual report who's funding them, and then you'll get some really good prospect research.

Keith Haney: 00:27:31

I love that.

I know years ago it was real popular to hire a grant expert who would come alongside your organization and maybe do the grant writing for you and they would get a portion of whatever grant money was received. Is, is that still an option for people or is it better if they just themselves do the homework and dig in and go look for the places that fit them?

Renee Bourke: 00:27:57

First off, from a professional standpoint, it's considered unethical to take a percentage of any grant that's won. And that would be from the association. Yeah, I'm going to point that out.

So from the association of Professional Fundraisers and the Grant Professional association, it's that taking a percentage of a grant is not okay. You can earn, you can earn a wage, like an hourly wage and some of these things, but percentage based pay is not okay.

But you can learn how to write grants in so many different venues.

There are all kinds of online classes, there's getting funded, which has all kinds of step by step instructions and generations of people have learned how to write grants through it. And there's all kinds of checklists. And you learn by doing this is like an inescapable fact, like Life is that you learn by doing.

And you just have to get started. You can start with some simple grants and just get more experienced. You can volunteer even and learn that way.

But I'm going to tell you also, one of the most powerful experiences that I have in my class is when I hand out a stack of grant proposals and scoring matrix to students and they read these different proposals and then have a simple, like, they just read it and then, and then have to decide. They have to pick one and then they have to articulate why. And that is like better than many, many grant programs, writing experiences.

The light bulb goes on. And so you could do that too.

You could get some grant proposals, set them up with your coffee, review them, and articulate why and then go back and write your own.

Keith Haney: 00:30:30

You mentioned the challenge that AI presents in the grant writing process. So what are some of the cautions of what AI is doing when it comes to grant writing?

Renee Bourke: 00:30:40

So what, what I'm, what I'm hearing a lot of people are doing and what some companies are encouraging is that you can do some prospect research. So that's, you know, looking for funders and then just automate the proposal process.

So one thing that I'm very concerned about is the idea of garbage in, garbage out. I have not heard that AI proposal writing makes you more successful. I have not personally heard that. I just heard that you can put out more.

So funders, of course, have screening tools to see if AI is writing proposals because they actually, what that signals to them is, oh, you don't care enough to write a proposal. To me, they, they want to know, like, does the leadership even know that you're writing this proposal? Or did the machine just write this proposal?

I mean, these are like concerns. And it was the same, you know, whenever we've had a technological innovation that it causes a surge of proposal writing.

But like I said, philanthropy is at its heart a trust based endeavor. And philanthropists still want to know that this is coming from you and you really intend to do this project.

This project reflects the values and the capacities and the communities of your organization. And they're very nervous if they feel like you don't mean that. So because we are going into essentially a business partnership, if we say yes.

So, so this is all still like, all of AI still being worked out. And of course some AI is, is really helping a lot. There's a lot of stress in the nonprofit sector financially right now.

And, and so this is making a lot of workflows easier in a lot of respects. But again, there's issues with AI. There's a lot of bias in AI. We know about that. There's a lot of inaccuracy in AI.

There's so much going on, so it can be used to a point. But at some point the humans still have to write it, they still have to review it, they have to endorse it.

The leadership has to say, yes, we're going to do it. But it is a wonder at automating some aspects.

Keith Haney: 00:33:55

So you've been part of securing over $600 million worldwide in grants. What story stands out in terms of its impact on transforming a community or a culture?

Renee Bourke: 00:34:06

There are so many to think about and of course our Guatemala project is really amazing to think about. I'm going to throw out two and try to be brief about it.

The first is when I was with the University of Idaho, I taught rural communities with very low resources. And we brought regular community leaders together and taught them.

The natural leaders would emerge and they would develop projects for their communities based on what they thought would make the biggest difference. And then we would do grant writing instruction at the very end because of course you have to fund projects, not just think about them.

Keith Haney: 00:35:10

Right.

Renee Bourke: 00:35:11

And so in, in one of the first workshops, because we did these and the, the grant writing was a three day intensive at the very end that we would do in these hotel rooms, very, or hotel conferences. And they were very, very intense.

One of my students from Kellogg, Idaho, which is a very small mountain town, never written a grant in her life, got an MRI machine for her little tiny community hospital. And this was just transformational for them.

They barely had an X ray machine and they got an MRI machine and that was incredible and wonderful for them. So.

And then because of the success of that, she organized a group in her community for grant writing and she became a leader and, and then she had a grant writing group and it just spread from there. And that is exactly what you want when you are looking for teacher leaders in your work.

And, and then in Guatemala, I mentioned these sewing, these entrepreneur centers that we are active with building and women's empowerment. And part of what we again want to do is to help people build and then have them take it over.

So we started these, their sewing entrepreneur centers, which fabric and weaving is traditional there. And we started these sewing centers.

Once we got the centers set up and the women trained in doing this and taught them how to run things, what they started to do was pull in other women to get trained because once they go through a training, we set them up with the sewing machine and everything they need to start their own business, and they spin out doing their own businesses. So one woman had been. Had been in college and had been.

Had been raped and was pregnant from this situation and shunned by her family, and she was washing clothes in the river to survive with her son. The women from the sewing center talked to her and said, come to the sewing center, and we're going to teach you a trade and come into our community.

And so she did. She learned how to sew and got the certificate and got, in the end, got her machine and everything to start a business.

And then she went out and eventually opened a shop. And now she makes. She makes sports uniforms and all of these things.

She has her own business, her son goes to school, and she's standing on her own feet. And that is the big why. That's the why. The so what? Which is the question that we have to ask with everything that we do, the things that we start.

It's a drive towards the why. And I'm so proud of them. And they did that all by themselves. Once they get going, that's what they were driving towards.

Keith Haney: 00:39:21

That's great. So I'd love to ask my guests this question.

As you think about all the work you're doing, all the impact you're having, what do you want your legacy to be?

Renee Bourke: 00:39:31

You know, it's interesting. I don't feel that I need to see my legacy or know it. I'm very happy to work on all of these things, to teach all these people and then let it go.

And I'm very happy that I have helped all these people that I will never meet, because I kind of believe that there's a kind of faith in that. It's almost important to do it and not expect a return, to not expect some kind of elevation from it.

And that that makes it more special that you're doing it really like for you, and because you believe in it so thoroughly. And the legacy is something that lives. That lives out in the world and as a kind of faith.

Keith Haney: 00:40:51

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's great. So in season six of the podcast, we're doing something special. We're asking a surprise question.

Pick a number between one and five for your surprise question.

Renee Bourke: 00:41:03

I like the number five.

Keith Haney: 00:41:05

All right. If you got stuck in an elevator and were forced to listen to one song, what song would you pick?

Renee Bourke: 00:41:16

Oh, no question. Al Green. Let's Stay Together.

Keith Haney: 00:41:21

Oh, I love that song. I never saw you as an Al Green person. That's really cool. Well, Renee, I thank you so much for this.

As we wrap up this conversation, what key takeaway you want to leave with the audience today?

Renee Bourke: 00:41:40

I really do hope that they'll get a copy of Getting Funded and that they'll learn to write grants because you have a lot of power.

And if you learn to get funded because your ideas are just your ideas until you get them funded and you get them out into the world and you see those results. And I know because there have been generations of people using this book, they love this book.

I hear all the time from people who say, I wish I had this at the beginning of my career. This is the book that I have on my shelf.

And I know that you'll have a connection and I would love, if you ask me this question about my legacy, I would love to have a connection with your listeners through my book so that I can help them and I can be in conversation with them through this book because I really care about them doing this work and being part of this faith of others. Thank you.

Keith Haney: 00:42:49

Thank you. Where can people pick up the book and connect with you on social media?

Renee Bourke: 00:42:54

So the book, there's a lot of. So there's a lot of formats of the book. There's different kinds of ebooks.

There's the paper book and so forth, which you can find at www.gettingfundedbooks plural and which you'll really enjoy seeing the different kind of formats that the book is in. And on social media, you can find me on LinkedIn and you can find me on Substack and there'll be more social media rolling out. Please stay tuned.

Yeah.

Keith Haney: 00:43:37

So, Renee, thank you so much for being a guest on the show and providing such amazing content. Thank you.

Renee Bourke: 00:43:43

Thank you. I so enjoyed it.