Denise is one of our students in our grant writing class, so I decided to get to know her a bit better by asking why she chose to be in this class. Denise is currently taking Grant Writing in order to fulfill the requirements for her third master’s degree. Denise has a bachelor’s degree in music education, and has already completed two master’s degrees – master’s in divinity and master’s in church music. For this third master’s degree, Denise is working to complete a master of music in music education. Previously, Denise has had 30 years of experience working in 8 different churches and 5 different nominations, conducting and leading church music.
With this third master’s degree in the making, Denise is in the process of also designing a program for life-enrichment and health benefits for senior adults through singing. She is designing this program all on her own, hoping that it will meet the needs of adults ranging in ages from retirement through facility care. Denise got the idea for this program in June of 2016 and she has been developing it ever since. In England, there's a similar program titled Silver Singing Circles, which allows senior adults in the community or in facilities to come and sing together. Unfortunately, this sort of program does not yet exist in the states, which inspired Denise to design a similar program. The main idea of this program is that it will allow adults the opportunity to sing songs, but they will not be limited to church music. This program is to be adaptable to all styles of music and adaptable to any elder.
The only issue with this program is that Denise is unsure of how to get funds, which led her to come back to school to learn more about grant money. Denise has already conducted a lot of research for her program, and she has discovered that there is a lot of grant money available for seniors in underserved communities. While taking this class, Denise hopes to use the skills taken from this class in order to have a better understanding of grant writing as well how to be proactive for finding grants for the future.