Grants/ funding for helping women who are experiencing substance use di
August 16, 2016 12:49 PM Subscribe
my sister has a social work degree but worked in the social work field very little after she had her children. She and a friend have been volunteering with women and I am wondering if they can receive grants to support this work.
We live in Ohio, and like other places, there has been a tremendous amount of folks experiencing opioid use disorder order. A woman from our church has successfully been helping young women deal with the painful process of withdrawal with essential oils. Many of these young women have a history of trauma and have found the treatments to benefit them on both a physical and emotional level.
My sister and her friend are volunteering to help these women in different spaces (treatment facilitates) at no cost. I was wondering if there are any grants that they would be eligible for to provide these services.
Also, are their opportunities under the ACA as community health workers to provide these service? My sister is in recovery from substance use disorder and may also be able to be a peer counselor.
Thanks so much! My sister has a healing heart and I would love to see her be able to use her BA in someway- she as been working in a soul sucking role as a sectary for the past 30 years to provide for her kids.
We live in Ohio, and like other places, there has been a tremendous amount of folks experiencing opioid use disorder order. A woman from our church has successfully been helping young women deal with the painful process of withdrawal with essential oils. Many of these young women have a history of trauma and have found the treatments to benefit them on both a physical and emotional level.
My sister and her friend are volunteering to help these women in different spaces (treatment facilitates) at no cost. I was wondering if there are any grants that they would be eligible for to provide these services.
Also, are their opportunities under the ACA as community health workers to provide these service? My sister is in recovery from substance use disorder and may also be able to be a peer counselor.
Thanks so much! My sister has a healing heart and I would love to see her be able to use her BA in someway- she as been working in a soul sucking role as a sectary for the past 30 years to provide for her kids.
I haven't read it, but I did find this PDF on the ACA and community health workers: http://www.chlpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ACA-Opportunities-for-CHWsFINAL-8-12.pdf
I agree that grants for individuals of the sort you hope exist are rare, at best. Grants tend to be for doing a specific limited thing and very often are for things like adding physical infrastructure for a program. Grants generally are not for paying the light bill or the salary of people who already work there or that sort of thing.
I am a former homemaker who used to do a lot of volunteer work. I will gently suggest that your sister needs to work on figuring out how to get paid for her work as part of her own recovery process. You might read the emotional labor thread on the blue if you have not already (you can google it easily, and the link is also in my profile) and recommend it to her as well. Women are expected to do a lot of caretaking merely because we care and we are very often not paid for it. This is a societal thing, but it is a thing women also internalize and once we internalize it, our expectations are part of the problem.
So, there are a few options here:
1) Total up the hours she is doing this stuff and see if she can spend that time doing something else that is actually paid work. These days, there are opportunities online to do gig work part time and intermittently that simply didn't exist 30 years ago. Divert her volunteer hours into gig work of some kind.
2) If she wishes to continue doing the kind of work she is doing now, investigate her options for making the work she is doing a consultancy of some kind. Since she has a social work degree, she can probably legally call herself a social worker, though she would need to investigate the laws of her state concerning what kinds of credentials she needs to call herself specific titles. There are people who start independent companies and they carefully investigate the language they can use to describe the kinds of work they do and not have it get them in trouble. So, for example, "Aromatherapy coach" might be ok but "Aromatherapy doctor/nurse/other official title" would not be.
3) Put together a resume that includes her education and volunteer experience and downplays her secretarial work and start applying to jobs that are similar to what she is currently doing and that pay at least as well as her current job. This is basically how I got my first full time paid job at age 40 or 41. I filled my resume with education and volunteer work because I had been a homemaker forever. The book "What color is your parachute?" may be useful to her. It did me a lot of good.
It took me a long time to get it through my thick skull that, no, people aren't going to stop walking all over me merely because not walking on me would be the right thing to do. People aren't going to give me money just because I enhance their life out of the goodness of my heart. If I want money, I need to get a job or build a business and explicitly demand that I get paid for x, y and z as part of the social contract.
Given the kinds of things I like working on, figuring out how to work all that out has been challenging. But I am making headway on it. So, what I am telling is that, like your sister, I like taking care of other people and, for the longest time, I did not get paid for it. I kind of got compensation for part of it because I was homemaker, so I got supported by my husband. But I did a lot more beyond take care of him and our kids and that was mostly volunteer work and people just expected me to be endlessly giving and that was it.
This is a problem space I have been contemplating for a great many years. A grant is very unlikely to solve it for your sister.
I also know a man who does a thing he likes doing and it has a track record of success to some degree for its niche and he keeps hoping for a grant that never comes. This has been going on for like 20 years or more.
I tried to help him figure out how to monetize it and he does not want to "sell his soul" by making it commercial and he does not want to "do an annual PBS-style begathon" and support it with donations, etc. There is no acceptable financing mechanism in his mind other than a grant and he has a master's degree and is a decently paid professional, but somehow just can't adjust his relationship to money on this issue. At some point I told him that winning the lottery was the only financing mechanism that would work given the restrictions he was artificially placing on how to finance his project.
posted by Michele in California at 1:47 PM on August 16, 2016
I agree that grants for individuals of the sort you hope exist are rare, at best. Grants tend to be for doing a specific limited thing and very often are for things like adding physical infrastructure for a program. Grants generally are not for paying the light bill or the salary of people who already work there or that sort of thing.
I am a former homemaker who used to do a lot of volunteer work. I will gently suggest that your sister needs to work on figuring out how to get paid for her work as part of her own recovery process. You might read the emotional labor thread on the blue if you have not already (you can google it easily, and the link is also in my profile) and recommend it to her as well. Women are expected to do a lot of caretaking merely because we care and we are very often not paid for it. This is a societal thing, but it is a thing women also internalize and once we internalize it, our expectations are part of the problem.
So, there are a few options here:
1) Total up the hours she is doing this stuff and see if she can spend that time doing something else that is actually paid work. These days, there are opportunities online to do gig work part time and intermittently that simply didn't exist 30 years ago. Divert her volunteer hours into gig work of some kind.
2) If she wishes to continue doing the kind of work she is doing now, investigate her options for making the work she is doing a consultancy of some kind. Since she has a social work degree, she can probably legally call herself a social worker, though she would need to investigate the laws of her state concerning what kinds of credentials she needs to call herself specific titles. There are people who start independent companies and they carefully investigate the language they can use to describe the kinds of work they do and not have it get them in trouble. So, for example, "Aromatherapy coach" might be ok but "Aromatherapy doctor/nurse/other official title" would not be.
3) Put together a resume that includes her education and volunteer experience and downplays her secretarial work and start applying to jobs that are similar to what she is currently doing and that pay at least as well as her current job. This is basically how I got my first full time paid job at age 40 or 41. I filled my resume with education and volunteer work because I had been a homemaker forever. The book "What color is your parachute?" may be useful to her. It did me a lot of good.
It took me a long time to get it through my thick skull that, no, people aren't going to stop walking all over me merely because not walking on me would be the right thing to do. People aren't going to give me money just because I enhance their life out of the goodness of my heart. If I want money, I need to get a job or build a business and explicitly demand that I get paid for x, y and z as part of the social contract.
Given the kinds of things I like working on, figuring out how to work all that out has been challenging. But I am making headway on it. So, what I am telling is that, like your sister, I like taking care of other people and, for the longest time, I did not get paid for it. I kind of got compensation for part of it because I was homemaker, so I got supported by my husband. But I did a lot more beyond take care of him and our kids and that was mostly volunteer work and people just expected me to be endlessly giving and that was it.
This is a problem space I have been contemplating for a great many years. A grant is very unlikely to solve it for your sister.
I also know a man who does a thing he likes doing and it has a track record of success to some degree for its niche and he keeps hoping for a grant that never comes. This has been going on for like 20 years or more.
I tried to help him figure out how to monetize it and he does not want to "sell his soul" by making it commercial and he does not want to "do an annual PBS-style begathon" and support it with donations, etc. There is no acceptable financing mechanism in his mind other than a grant and he has a master's degree and is a decently paid professional, but somehow just can't adjust his relationship to money on this issue. At some point I told him that winning the lottery was the only financing mechanism that would work given the restrictions he was artificially placing on how to finance his project.
posted by Michele in California at 1:47 PM on August 16, 2016
Response by poster: Yes, they would of course start a non-profit - 501 3c
posted by Boyd at 1:51 PM on August 16, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Boyd at 1:51 PM on August 16, 2016 [1 favorite]
they would of course start a non-profit - 501 3c
Then I suggest they start working on that, plus reading up on fund raising generally. Most non profits are not supported by grants only. They would still need to come to terms with basically expecting to get paid for their work and asking for money in some sense.
I had a directorship for a voluntary health and welfare organization trying to become an official 501 3c charity. In other words, I was on the board of directors. They never finished the process. Becoming a charity involves a lot more than just a couple of women doing a thing and now qualifying for grants. You need a board and a whole lot of other stuff. It might be easier to start a small business as a consultant of some sort.
posted by Michele in California at 2:01 PM on August 16, 2016 [2 favorites]
Then I suggest they start working on that, plus reading up on fund raising generally. Most non profits are not supported by grants only. They would still need to come to terms with basically expecting to get paid for their work and asking for money in some sense.
I had a directorship for a voluntary health and welfare organization trying to become an official 501 3c charity. In other words, I was on the board of directors. They never finished the process. Becoming a charity involves a lot more than just a couple of women doing a thing and now qualifying for grants. You need a board and a whole lot of other stuff. It might be easier to start a small business as a consultant of some sort.
posted by Michele in California at 2:01 PM on August 16, 2016 [2 favorites]
I work at Foundation Center and very much agree with the suggestion to visit us, above! Our librarians in NY, Cleveland, DC, Atlanta, and San Fran are amazing and can be of great help. On GrantSpace.org, you can find our 400+ other partner libraries around the country. You can also explore FDO.foundationcenter.org--- there's a free version that becomes totally free to use from one of our libraries! It's a great prospect research tool.
Good luck!
posted by jenbo1 at 4:33 AM on August 17, 2016 [1 favorite]
Good luck!
posted by jenbo1 at 4:33 AM on August 17, 2016 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
1. Grants made directly to individuals are nearly non-existent. They would need to get the grant through one of the organizations they work with, providing those organizations are 501c3 non-profits.
2. The best place to start looking for grants is to visit the public library, which almost always has a subscription to Foundation Center. This is a database you can use to search for foundations that make grants in your area for the work that you do. A librarian can certainly help you/them navigate the database.
posted by Lutoslawski at 1:22 PM on August 16, 2016 [2 favorites]